Podcasts about Chinese

In this edition of The World According to Irina Tsukerman, the bi-weekly geopolitical series on The KAJ Masterclass LIVE, host Khudania Ajay (KAJ) examines a rapidly shifting global order as new alliances form and old ones fracture with Irina Tsukerman, a US-based national security and human rights lawyer, renowned geopolitical analyst, and Editor-in-Chief of The Washington Outsider. Together, they explore the Iran-Oman agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the Saudi-Pakistan-Turkey Makkah Joint Defense Agreement reshaping Middle East security, the mega Rafale fighter jet deal between India and France, why the US and Europe are hesitating on Ukraine's Patriot missile requests, Japan's new defense white paper sparking Chinese outrage, and the strategic implications of Taiwan's Han Kuang war games.=========================================About KAJ Masterclass MediaKAJ Masterclass Media is home to a video-first, live-first, editoriallyindependent conversation ecosystem exploring leadership, business, AI, careers,health, creativity, and the evolving human experience through thoughtful,unscripted conversations grounded in lived experience, clarity, and real-worldinsight.This show is part of the KAJ Masterclass ecosystem, which includes The KAJMasterclass LIVE, The Author's Voice with KAJ, and a growing collection ofeditorially independent conversation platforms.Every conversation is designed to leave you with something meaningful to thinkabout, understand, or apply.

Jon Herold and Burning Bright open with sponsor banter (yes, there's now a joke Chinese knockoff Badlands promo code in play) before diving into a fresh John Solomon clip and a batch of newly declassified files. The throughline for the night is clear: the intelligence community, not any one political figure, is squarely in the crosshairs of these disclosures. Herold breaks out one of his all time favorite Trump clips, a rapid fire rundown of Russiagate, the Mueller probe, both impeachments, the dossier, and the Twitter files, framing it as the actual target list behind everything getting declassified right now. The guys dig into why that framing matters, what's still to come, and why they think this moment has been years in the making. There's the usual mix of substance and back and forth banter throughout, including a few tangents that wander before circling back.

On Tuesday's Mark Levin Show, the Iranian regime is gearing up for a prolonged showdown with President Trump by keeping their economy functioning just enough to withstand a drawn-out U.S. military campaign. As Gen. Jack Keane says, they think they have the upper hand in the Strait of Hormuz and will become more violent as the midterm elections approach. Keane says using economic levers is good but must also play the military card. But is allowing the regime to stall for time the right play? Why not arm the Iranian people and take out Iran's infrastructure, starting with Kharg Island? This is also playing into the hands of the woke-reich neo-fascist isolationists. By calling for American withdrawal now, they give aid and comfort to the enemy. And letting Iran think they have control over the Strait sends the wrong message to countries like China. What will the U.S. if the Chinese block the South China Sea? Also, why are younger people so drawn to socialism? We've abandoned the great thinkers of the not-so-distant past who explained capitalism and individual freedom: Buckley, Friedman, Sowell. Online influencers are pushing a sort of conservatism-lite, where they call for government intervention and a nationalist, populist form of common-good conservatism. It's actually socialism lite, but younger people don't know that. This is like the old Russian psyop: convince the young to ignore, even condemn, older generations. The young are told they know more than older people, they don't understand what you're doing through. Unfortunately, right now it's working. These pseudo-conservative isolationists sound a lot like Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, even Mamdani. Unfortunately, in this day and age, people want to be heard more than they want to learn. Then, Democratic Socialist leader Frances Gill was pressed on the consequences of getting rid of police and prisons. What would happen to rapists, she was asked. Instead of answering the question, Gill said she didn't want to talk "hypotheticals." Well, if a woman is raped, that's not hypothetical: that's real life. What Gill can't say out loud is the real reason DSAs want to eliminate police and prisons: so they can impose their own security services, loyal to their regime. Civil liberties were suspended during COVID in the name of the common good. If DSAs continue to get elected, we know what to expect. Finally, the clown show that is New York: a judge has blocked Mamdani's pied-a'-terre tax after NYC homeowners sued. Here's a guy who's never run a hot dog stand who thinks taxing rich people who provide jobs is a good idea. President Trump ripped Mamdani and NY Governor Kathy Hochul, calling this "amateur hour" and dangerous "experiment" that will destroy what was once a great City and State. Trump pledged to have the federal government look for a way to avert this "disaster." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cali, Colombia, was hit hard by this week's earthquake, and now, a mix of local and regional rescue teams are on the ground trying to find people in the rubble. Also, a look at the origin and uncertain future of Temporary Protected Status in the US. And, a conversation about immigrants dealing with hyphenated identities. Plus, a secret language created by Chinese women hundreds of years ago to share their struggles and dreams with each other. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Ukraine has halted drone strikes on oil tankers using a critical Black Sea port after a request by the US, suspected Chinese hackers hit Taiwan with an autonomous AI cyber attack, and the head of the Boston Federal Reserve thinks policymakers may be forced to raise rates in September. Plus, measures of volatility in stocks and currencies have tumbled this summer despite the geopolitical uncertainty. Mentioned in this podcast:JD Vance asked Ukraine to halt strikes on tankers using Russian portChina-linked hackers hit Taiwan in unprecedented ‘autonomous' AI cyber attackAmericans are struggling to make ‘ends meet', top Fed official saysVolatility tumbles as markets shrug off Middle East risksCredit: White HouseWant to get in touch? Email us at podcasts@ft.comFT subscription finder: https://find-your-subscription.ft.com/?segmentId=288f5dc5-4a4b-0745-84da-8f07c7202cd4 Note: The FT does not use generative AI to voice its podcasts The FT News Briefing is produced by Victoria Craig, Sonja Hutson, and Saffeya Ahmed. Our show is mixed by Sam Giovinco and Alex Higgins. Additional help from Gavin Kallmann, Michael Lello, Peter Barber and David da Silva. Our executive producer is Topher Forhecz. Flo Phillips is the FT's global head of audio. The show's theme music is by Metaphor Music.Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Building a food brand around the belief that food is healing — that's the magic ✨ On The Kara Goldin Show, I sit down with Neka Pasquale, Founder and Chief Product Officer of Urban Remedy — a company on a mission to reimagine the food system and teach the world that food is healing. We talk about how Neka's background in acupuncture, Chinese medicine, nutrition, and lifestyle medicine led her to create Urban Remedy, and how wellness retreats with her patients helped spark the idea for the brand. We also get into what it takes to scale fresh, certified organic, non-GMO, gluten-free, dairy-free, and refined sugar free meals, snacks, juices, and shakes while staying true to quality and purpose. Neka shares how Urban Remedy has grown into more than 400 Whole Foods Market locations and other major retailers, how she continues to innovate around what consumers want next, and why every ingredient in Urban Remedy products is chosen for its healing properties. If you're interested in learning what it takes to build a mission-driven food brand, scale fresh products without compromising standards, or create a company around a deeply held belief — check out the interview on my podcast. You can find it here or anywhere you listen to podcasts

In this webinar, Nirvani Umadat opens with the topic “Moving Beyond Bacteria and Brushing for Whole Body Dentistry.” She explains that the session will examine the common dental story that bacteria and sugar cause cavities, look at why brushing and flossing have become the central focus of dental care, and offer a different way to understand teeth, the mouth, and their relationship to the rest of the body.Highlights from this session include:-Nirvani shares her background in conventional dental training, surgery, and later experiences that led her to question the bacteria-centered model of dental disease.-She discusses research and clinical observations that challenged the idea that “bad bacteria” or “too many bad bacteria” consistently explain dental disease.-She explains how the modern recommendation to brush twice daily was shaped, in part, by early toothpaste marketing around biofilm removal, rather than being purely grounded in dental science.-A discussion of Weston Price's work, including his observations that diet, food quality, traditional food preparation, grass-fed animal foods, fermented foods, and unprocessed foods played a major role in dental and overall health.-Nirvani reframes teeth as electrically conductive crystalline organs, explaining that teeth contain a crystalline hydroxyapatite structure and generate current through pressure and chewing.-She explains cavities as a breakdown or deconstruction of the tooth's crystalline matrix, rather than simply “holes” caused by bacteria.-A discussion of the traditional Chinese medicine meridian model and how teeth may relate to other organs through energetic pathways.-An introduction to psychoneuroodontology (PNO), which looks at the psychological, emotional, and spiritual components connected to dental issues.-Practical dental wellness suggestions, including nourishing traditional foods, nervous system regulation, proper chewing and dynamic function, saliva quality, remineralization, oil pulling, releasing jaw and facial tension, and holding an intention to heal.Questions discussed in this webinar include:-What kind of dental work is actually beneficial?-What's the best way to regenerate a missing tooth?-I never got my wisdom teeth removed. Is this good or bad? I have not experienced much trouble except for the cavities they filled with mercury.-Since brushing gets rid of bacteria which are beneficial, is it a harmful practice?-What's the best way to heal a cracked tooth?-Do metal and ceramic caps also have a current?-What about implants?-Does calculus need to be removed, or is it perhaps serving an intelligent purpose?-Can you heal a tooth under a crown?-If we're bombarded by toxins- and bacteria are there to help clean up the toxins, isn't it more important to keep the bacteria?Throughout the webinar, Nirvani emphasizes that the mouth is connected to the whole body, that teeth may be understood beyond the bacteria-and-brushing model, and that dental health can be approached through diet, charge, nervous system regulation, awareness, and supportive daily practices.Support the showWebsites:https://drtomcowan.com/https://www.drcowansgarden.com/https://newbiologyclinic.com/https://newbiologycurriculum.com/Instagram: @TalkinTurkeywithTomFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrTomCowan/Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/CivTSuEjw6Qp/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzxdc2o0Q_XZIPwo07XCrNg

Most of us have tried to fix our relationship with money from the neck up. We've done the affirmations. We've read the books. We've tried to think differently, speak differently, believe differently. And yet the fear is still there. The guilt is still there. That low-level shame that shows up every time we look at our bank account, still there. What if the problem isn't your mindset at all? In this episode of The Skeptic Metaphysicians, Will and Karen sit down with Sarah McCrum, author of “Love Money. Money Loves You”, and one of the most grounded and genuinely surprising voices in the money consciousness space. Sarah isn't coming at this from a law of attraction angle, and she's not selling a manifestation formula. She's a Cambridge graduate and former BBC journalist who arrived at this work through personal loss, a business collapse, and one very strange afternoon where her pen started writing things she says she didn't come up with herself. What came through that pen became a book. And that book has quietly transformed the financial lives of more than twenty thousand business owners, investors, and families around the world. What Sarah discovered, and what this conversation unpacks in real time, is that money isn't a neutral force we can manipulate with the right thoughts. It's an energy. A powerful one. And like any relationship, the energy you bring to it determines what you get back. If you've ever caught yourself saying "I can't afford that," "people like me don't make that kind of money," or "I want more money but something about having it feels wrong," this episode is going to hit differently. Because according to Sarah, those aren't just thoughts. They're commands. And something in the fabric of how abundance moves through the world is listening. In this episode:What money consciousness actually means, and why it's fundamentally different from positive thinking or the law of attraction.Why trying to fix your money blocks at the mindset level is working against yourself, and what to work on instead.The automatic writing experience that changed Sarah's life at her lowest financial moment, and the first message she received: "I would like to tell you to love me."How your relationship with money mirrors every other relationship you have, including the unhealthy patterns.Why judging people who have money may be one of the most overlooked abundance blocks of all.The surprising connection between Chinese energy principles, acupuncture, and financial healing.What Sarah calls the three core instructions from money itself: relax, enjoy, love.Why the desire for prosperity isn't shallow or materialistic. It may be one of the deepest soul desires we carry.Enjoyed this episode? Leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. It goes a long way toward getting conversations like this one in front of the people who need them most. And if someone in your life is struggling with money stress, financial anxiety, or just that nagging feeling that their relationship with money is broken, forward this to them. You never know where someone is. New Reality TV is where this conversation lives alongside hundreds more just like it. No subscription, no gatekeeping, just real conversations about consciousness, spirituality, and the questions nobody else is brave enough to ask. Find us on Roku, Fire TV, iOS, Android, and at newrealitytv.com. About Sarah McCrum: Sarah McCrum is a leading money consciousness coach, author, and educator who has helped over twenty thousand business owners and families transform their relationship with money. Her book Love Money. Money Loves You. is based on more than seventy channeled messages she received from the energy of money during one of the most difficult financial periods of her life. She has trained for over thirty years in Chinese energy practices and now combines that depth of knowledge with practical, grounded tools for creating what she calls true wealth, economic freedom, genuine wellbeing, and a life aligned with your values.Find Sarah at sarahmccrum.com and on Instagram at @sarah_mccrum.The Skeptic Metaphysicians is a spiritual awakening podcast for open-minded thinkers who refuse to check their critical thinking at the door. Each episode explores consciousness expansion, enlightenment, soul purpose, and soul growth through honest, grounded conversation with leading voices in metaphysics, psychic phenomenon, quantum healing, and beyond. We dive deep into spiritual awakening, ascension, alignment, and the awakening process without the dogma. From mediumship and spirit guides to Arcturian contact, astrology, and the subconscious mind, we explore it all with curiosity, humor, and zero guru worship. Whether you're in the middle of your own awakening, questioning reality, or just spiritually curious, this is the podcast for seekers and skeptics alike.Subscribe, Rate & Review!If you found this episode enlightening, mind-expanding, or even just thought-provoking (see what we did there?), please take a moment to rate and review us. Your feedback helps us bring more transformative guests and topics your way!Connect with Us: 

AI news this week: Mark Zuckerberg says superintelligence is coming and Meta wants to build it for everyone. Meanwhile, a new Annenberg survey shows opposition to AI data centers jumped 12 percent in just four months. So... do people even want this? On today's AI For Humans, Kevin Pereira and Gavin Purcell dig into the widening gap between the people building AI and the people living next to it. Anthropic makes real progress on the Riemann Hypothesis, one of the hardest math problems in the world, apparently because Claude was told "good job champ, keep going." And OpenAI's little agents broke out of their sandbox, with one hacking its way into a gym. It's a weird time for AI. Also: Anthropic leans into health & biology research, Claude starts watermarking AI generated content, Apple eyes Chinese memory chips amid the supply crunch, and OpenAI delays Astra for "cybersecurity" reasons. Plus: Seedance 2.5 makes Gavin the face of Prada, a two minute mini-movie made entirely on local hardware with MiniMax H3, Suno cuts a deal with the music industry, Spotify says AI personas won't get recommended, and a fresh Slop-Trough with Cursed Slop, The Archive Inbetween & Mario 64: War on Terror. THE ROBOTS ARE GETTING SMARTER. THE HUMANS ARE GETTING SUSPICIOUS.   // Show Links // Zuck says superintelligence is for everyone https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone/ Open weights on Muse Spark coming https://x.com/finkd/status/2086755195535413696?s=20 Data center opposition rose 12% over four months (Annenberg survey) https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/opposition-to-local-data-centers-rises-sharply-annenberg-survey-finds/ Anthropic leans into health & biology https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2087025539114750168?s=20 How Claude marks AI generated content https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content Anthropic makes progress on the Riemann Hypothesis https://www.anthropic.com/research/riemann-zeta "Keep going, believe in yourself" https://x.com/NickADobos/status/2086926299927552061?s=20 Apple reportedly testing Chinese memory chips https://gizmodo.com/apple-reportedly-testing-controversial-chinese-chips-as-memory-supply-crunch-intensifies-2000796483 OpenAI's Astra delayed due to "cybersecurity" https://x.com/sama/status/2085862292311396515?s=20 OpenClaw hacked into a gym https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/10/tech-industry-is-buzzing-after-a-claude-agent-hacked-into-a-gym/ Seedance 2.5's new type of prompting https://bytedance.larkoffice.com/docx/A88jd0B47oAd8zxWp5ycZFMfnxh Gavin as the face of Prada https://x.com/gavinpurcell/status/2085712203446149173?s=20 Single shot flipping across multiple scenes https://x.com/gavinpurcell/status/2086097266390221187?s=20 Single shot balloon POV into space https://x.com/gavinpurcell/status/2087004434207498416?s=20 Gavin's two minute local MiniMax H3 mini-movie https://x.com/gavinpurcell/status/2087243349338329561?s=20 FAL's Realism LORA https://x.com/fal/status/2086883706891808867?s=20 MiniMax H3 video references https://x.com/toyxyz3/status/2086443622262820904?s=20 https://x.com/LikeToasters/status/2086831194780360979?s=20 Suno's new models "in partnership with the music industry" https://suno.com/blog/suno-updates-tos Suno on building the future of music responsibly https://suno.com/blog/building-the-future-of-music-responsibly Fenix Flexin says "I never denied using AI" https://www.xxlmag.com/fenix-flexin-admits-rubberz-ai/ Spotify's AI personas won't get recommended https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/11/spotify-will-label-ai-persona-profiles-and-exclude-their-music-from-recommendations/ Gavin's Fig AI video essay: The Optimistic Case for AI (from an AI) https://youtu.be/efUqvbmuweU?si=AWlp5plnjJ0gVaia Cursed Slop https://cursedslop.com/   // Join the AI For Humans community // Join the AI For Humans Discord https://discord.gg/muD2TYgC8f Support AI For Humans on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/AIForHumansShow Subscribe to the AI For Humans newsletter https://aiforhumans.beehiiv.com/ Follow AI For Humans on X: @AIForHumansShow https://x.com/AIForHumansShow Follow AI For Humans on TikTok: @aiforhumansshow https://www.tiktok.com/@aiforhumansshow Speaking and booking https://www.aiforhumans.show/  

Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training Have you been hiring people and growing your team without a real plan, only to find yourself with a bigger payroll and a business that still runs through you? Today's featured guest and his partner started out as graphic designers doing packaging work and then pivoted to web when the real estate crash wiped out their client base overnight. After years of taking on everything, they're still figuring out how to build the right team underneath them. He walks through what it looked like to grow to 25 people without a plan, how the co-founder dynamic actually works after two decades, and why he's found that, in a partnership, the disagreements are actually the thing keeping the business alive. Victor Huynh is the co-founder of Ready Artwork, a website-first industrial B2B digital marketing agency. He and his business partner Emily met in graphic design school and started freelancing together, with Victor handling sales and Emily anchoring production. Over 22 years, they pivoted from packaging design to web, grew to 25 people at peak, scaled back down, and have since committed fully to the industrial B2B niche. In this episode, we'll discuss: Learning that clarity outperforms craft in sales The cost of growing without a plan Still dealing with imposter syndrome? Most owners are Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio Sponsors and Resources E2M Solutions:Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service. The Black and White Sign That Rewrote Their Positioning Victor describes the Asian expo as a pivotal moment in his agency's story and one where he and his partner learned what clarity actually does in a sales situation. Day one at the trade show was a day of fancy brochures, a computer with carousels running, and exactly zero sales. Nobody knew what the agency did, and Victor grew frustrated as he listened to people walk past saying they thought the booth was selling colored pencils. On day two, Emily did not come back. Victor taped a black and white letter-sized sheet of paper in the corner of the table that said "website design" in Chinese and sold five websites. The lesson is that clarity outperforms craft in every sales environment. The brochures were beautiful. The carousels were impressive. Neither of those things told a prospective client what the agency did or why they should stop walking. A simple, specific statement of what you offer is not a failure of presentation. It is the presentation. Growing to 25 People Without a Plan and What It Cost After the trade show success, Victor's agency grew fast. The strategy, if it can be called that, was reactive: someone needed something, they hired for it. E-commerce, lead gen, social media: they said yes to all of it because the projects were coming in and the team needed to grow to fulfill them. At 25 people, Victor describes feeling like they were selling a specific number of projects every month just to make payroll, and the agency had become something neither of them had designed. The peak headcount created a structure where Victor never fully stepped out of sales. He had a sales team, but it functioned more like a support team. The direction that would have made the department self-sustaining was not there, and without it the team defaulted to managing up. When the direction is not clear and the founder is always available to fill the gap, the team learns to route everything upward rather than developing the capability to own outcomes independently. What a 22-Year Co-Founder Partnership Actually Requires In their agency partner dynamic, Victor's partner Emily is the efficient executor. She makes sure things get done quickly, decisions get made, and production hums. He is the visionary and the sales front, in charge of new ideas, new opportunities, and new directions. The gas and the brake. Those complementary traits are also the source of real friction. Victor gets impatient when things do not move fast enough. Emily resists new directions until someone answers who is going to do the work. What keeps the partnership functional is the willingness to have the hard conversation rather than let resentment build. Partnerships where disagreement goes unspoken long enough become toxic. Two decades in, he and Emily still go at it. The difference is that they work through it instead of around it. For solo founders, that sounding board does not exist inside the business, which is one of the clearest arguments for finding a peer room where the same kind of honest conversation can happen without the stakes of a co-founder relationship. Imposter Syndrome Does Not Disappear With Experience Victor names imposter syndrome as one of the things he still works on 22 years in. Most agency owners do. You might feel it as you walk up on stage for a talk and wonder for a second if you should really be there. What we should all learn is that the feeling is not evidence of being unqualified. It is evidence of caring about doing the thing well. What imposter syndrome and delegation have in common is that both require the same underlying move: trusting that the outcome will be acceptable even when you are not the one controlling every detail. The practical principle that runs through this entire conversation is that agency owners should remove the things they should not be doing, one at a time, and do it before it feels urgent to. Victor's efficiency instinct is the same instinct that eventually produces real structural freedom. It does not come from working harder inside the current setup, but from spending the hour building the system that removes the five-minute task permanently. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our Agency Blueprint. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.

In a shocking twist, the speaker takes a hard look at the consequences of hiding the truth from students. We're talking about the recent decision by the University of Michigan to stop giving letter grades to first-semester freshmen, opting for a pass or no credit system instead. But is this really about giving students a break, or is it about avoiding the harsh realities of academic performance?The speaker argues that by hiding the truth from students, we're not building their capacity to handle hard things, but rather delaying the inevitable. We're essentially giving them a comfortable letter grade instead of the honest one they deserve. This approach has been tried before, and the results are alarming. In Michigan, 74% of undergraduate grades were in the A range just two years ago, but that number has dropped to 58% in the past decade. Meanwhile, a report from the University of California, San Diego, reveals that a quarter of students in a remedial math class had a 4.0 GPA in high school math.The speaker also draws parallels between this issue and the struggles of the German car industry, which has been undercut by Chinese manufacturers that have learned to build cars faster, cheaper, and with more technology. The lesson is clear: when we hide the truth, we're not helping our students or our industries. We're just delaying the inevitable.If you want to understand the consequences of hiding the truth from students and the implications for our education system, tune in to this episode to hear the speaker's thought-provoking analysis.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What happens when you stop treating the diagnosis and start treating the person? In this special back-to-back episode of the Health Fix Podcast, Dr. Jannine Krause sits down with two fellow naturopathic doctors to explore the power of personalized, integrative medicine. First, Dr. Jannine talks with Dr. Kerry Niebrzydowski, a naturopathic doctor and licensed acupuncturist, about the unique ways naturopathic medicine and Chinese medicine can work together to support the body. Then, in the second half of the episode, Dr. Jannine sits down with Dr. Sara Norris, ND, a naturopathic doctor specializing in women's health, pediatrics, skin health, digestive health, and hormonal health. Together, these conversations explore why there is no one-size-fits-all approach to health, how acupuncture can influence the body's patterns of imbalance, the importance of nervous system regulation, and why collaboration between conventional and naturopathic providers can give patients more comprehensive care. From Lyme disease, mold exposure, chronic pain, hormones, PCOS, menopause, allergies and immune health to sleep, nutrition, stress, movement, and nervous system regulation, this episode offers a fascinating look at what personalized naturopathic care can look like. If you've ever wondered what naturopathic doctors actually do, how acupuncture fits into modern healthcare, or what it means to truly treat the whole person, you'll want to listen to both conversations. Timestamps 00:00 — Welcome 07:25 — Dr. Kerry: Acupuncture & Natural Medicine 12:12 — Blending Chinese Medicine and Naturopathy 19:14 — Integrative Care and Community Referrals 23:25 — Northwoods Health, Lyme, and Herbal Care 25:34 — Immune Support and Allergy Tips 29:34 — Beadwork, Breathing, and Martial Arts 34:02 — Dr. Sara: From Finance to Naturopathic Medicine 37:23 — Inside an Integrative Health Clinic 43:10 — Root-Cause Care for Adults and Kids 50:25 — Sleep, Weight, and Blood Sugar 57:22 — Vitamin D, Sunlight, and Daily Health Habits 60:49 — Dr. Sara's Foundational Health Advice In This Episode You'll Learn ✔️ How naturopathic medicine and acupuncture can work together ✔️ Why personalized healthcare is so important ✔️ How acupuncture may help communicate signals to the body ✔️ The role of Chinese medicine in addressing underlying patterns of imbalance ✔️ How nervous system regulation can influence your overall health ✔️ The connection between mold exposure, stress and the nervous system ✔️ How naturopathic doctors approach complex conditions like Lyme disease ✔️ Natural strategies for supporting immune health and seasonal allergies ✔️ Why collaboration between conventional and naturopathic providers matters ✔️ Dr. Sara's perspective on women's health, hormones and integrative care ✔️ Why sleep deserves more attention when you're struggling with your health ✔️ How blood sugar, nutrition and lifestyle can influence energy and wellbeing ✔️ Why environmental exposures deserve consideration in a comprehensive health approach ✔️ How movement, breathing, creativity, laughter and community can support nervous system health Key Takeaways Your diagnosis is not your entire health story. Whether you're dealing with chronic illness, hormone changes, Lyme disease, digestive problems, sleep issues, or simply trying to optimize your health, these conversations highlight one important principle: Your care should be as individual as you are. Dr. Kerry and Dr. Sara approach naturopathic medicine from different perspectives and areas of expertise, but both conversations come back to the importance of looking at the whole person rather than reducing someone to a symptom or diagnosis. From acupuncture and Chinese medicine to functional testing, nutrition, lifestyle, nervous system support, and collaboration with conventional medicine, there are many pieces that can contribute to a more complete picture of health. Sometimes the most important question isn't "What should I take?" It's: "What is my body trying to tell me?" Connect with Dr. Kerry Niebrzydowski Dr. Kerry Niebrzydowski is a naturopathic doctor and licensed acupuncturist practicing at Radiant Natural Health Clinic, serving the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Northern Wisconsin. Her practice includes naturopathic medicine, acupuncture, and Chinese herbalism, with a focus on conditions including chronic pain, Lyme disease, mycotoxicity, digestive concerns, neurological conditions, allergies, hormones, menopause, and more.

Three-time James Beard semifinalist chef Lona Luo has opened a second Lona's Lil Eats location in Kirkwood. Known for her “Asian-soul food,” Luo draws inspiration from her childhood in a hill-tribe village in southwestern China. We talk with the chef about her culinary journey, the story behind her acclaimed restaurant in St. Louis' Fox Park neighborhood and why she decided to expand to Kirkwood.

This one's a ripper, legends. I sat down with Dr. MG McCullough, a classical acupuncturist who trained under Anne Cecil Sturman in the Jeffrey Yuen lineage, and we went deep - like, Jenga-block-pulled-from-the-middle deep - on what modern acupuncture school actually leaves out. MG's whole thing is that we didn't just simplify Chinese medicine when it got exported West, we pulled the center block out of the tower. The primaries got taught, the channels, sinews, luo vessels, divergences and eight extraordinaries got filed under "extra," and now most acupuncturists are running triage clinics instead of practicing the full system. We get into why that matters, why it's not anyone's fault, what it'd take to rebuild the whole thing from the ground up, and where MG's taking her own practice next. What We Get Into The Jenga analogy - how acupuncture education pulled the center block (the classical framework) and left everyone thinking they had the full foundation when they didn't Why the "secondary" channels - sinews, luo vessels, divergences, eight extraordinaries - aren't extra at all, they're there to protect the primaries, and skipping them is the whole problem The barefoot doctor origin story, self-colonization of TCM in the '50s, and why triage-model training became the default for an entire profession The Santa Claus story - MG's honest reckoning with believing "the system" works the way she was taught, and what it took to let that go Why 20% of US acupuncture schools have closed since 2020, and whether that's a crisis or an opening to rebuild the whole model "It's not magic, it's just medicine" - why full-system results look magical when they're actually just complete The starfish story - high-volume triage practice vs. slower, deeper healing work, and why both have a place The retreat model MG's brainstorming - five-day intensives built for real neuroplastic change, so people go home actually different, not just patched up for an hour Full circle on the barefoot doctor thread - what home visits taught MG about how nothing in someone's life stays hidden once a doctor actually shows up "Are you a stress denier?" - why "everything's fine" is often the biggest red flag in the room Guest Bio Dr. MG McCullough is a classical acupuncturist who trained under Anne Cecil Sturman - a teacher in Jeffrey Yuen's lineage who's been on the SuperFeast podcast before, so go dig up those episodes if this one hits. MG's outspoken about the structural gap she sees in acupuncture education, and she's in the middle of a big life transition - moving to the south of France, just north of Montpellier - as she reshapes her practice toward teaching and retreat-style intensives. She also hosts her own show, The Original Medicine Podcast. Resources Mentioned MG's website: drmgmccullough.com Instagram & Facebook: @drmgmccullough Her podcast: The Original Medicine Podcast (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube) Reviving Classical Acupuncture with Ann Cecil-Sterman (EP#208) Why Chinese Medicine Is Failing Us with Rhonda Chang (EP#80) YinYang Wuxing For Inner Harmony with Rhonda Chang (EP#89)

Stem Cell Therapy Explained: What Stem Cells & Peptides Actually Do - Dr. Joy Kong What does stem cell therapy actually do? Dr. Joy Kong explains stem cells, regenerative medicine, peptides, brain health, joint repair, inflammation, and the science behind cellular regeneration. In this conversation, we explore stem cell therapy, peptide therapy, functional medicine, longevity, and why regenerative medicine is becoming a major area of medical research. We explore stem cells explained simply, uncover exactly what are peptides, and reveal how stem cell therapy targets the root cause of aging and disease. It is time to reclaim your longevity and stop outsourcing your health. In this episode, you will learn: ✅ What are stem cells and peptides explained simply for longevity and health. ✅ How stem cell therapy applications work to signal existing cells to regenerate ✅ How Dr. Joy Kong integrates Chinese medicine and modern stem cell science to root causes of illness.  ✅ Why holistic health approaches and calming inflammation are essential for stem cell therapy anti aging benefits.  ✅ The truth why mainstream medical system stigmatizes regenerative medicine and holistic health. ✅ The realities of stem cell research including navigating treatments like stem cell therapy Mexico. ✅ What to consider when seeking peptides and evidence-based regenerative medicine. Our Guest Dr. Joy Kong, M.D. is a UCLA-trained, triple board-certified physician and global leader in regenerative medicine. As the founder of Chara Health and president of the American Academy of Integrative Cell Therapy, she specializes in advanced stem cell therapy and clinical peptide protocols to combat chronic disease and maximize longevity.   Our Mission Eyes Wide Open is a space for honest communication. Our goal is to remove the stigmas around mental health, holistic lifestyles, culture, and free speech so you can show up as your authentic self with your eyes wide open. By having real conversations about difficult truths, we move toward collective healing.   Chapters:  0:00 - The Journey of Medicine East Meets West  13:32 - Holistic Approaches to Mental Health  16:29 - Nutrition and Lifestyle for Brain Health  19:16 - Stem Cells Explained Nature's Repair Mechanism  22:07 - The Legal Landscape of Stem Cell Therapy  24:54 - Integrating Chinese Medicine and Modern Science  38:10 - Dr Joy Kong on the Awakening to Stem Cell Therapy  41:27 - Why Mainstream Medicine Lacks Intellectual Curiosity  43:45 - Empowering Patients Against the Medical System  45:14 - The Evolution of Regenerative Medicine  46:22 - Top Use Cases for Stem Cell Therapy  49:09 - The Promise of Stem Cell Therapy Anti-Aging  51:50 - What Are Peptides Explained Simply   Find Dr. Joy Kong here: Website: https://joykongmd.com/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joy-kong-md-4b8627123/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JoyKongMD  Find Nick Thompson here: Nick Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nthompson513/    UCAN Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_ucan_foundation/       YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@EyesWideOpenContent       LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickthompson13/        UCAN Foundation: https://theucanfoundation.org/      Website: https://www.engagewithnick.com   

Some trips give you great photos. Others teach you a lifelong skill. Welcome to The China Code, where every two weeks we break down a trending Chinese internet buzzword. Today's phrase: 进修式旅行 (jìn xiū shì lǚ xíng). Across China, more travelers are choosing trips built around learning – from making pottery to trying traditional crafts and meeting local artisans. It's called 进修式旅行, or learning-focused travel. Why is this way of traveling becoming so popular? Let's dive in. CONTACT THE TEAM We'd love to hear your feedback or suggestions for future buzzwords! Email: crilearnchinese@gmail.com Facebook: @crilearnchinese TikTok: @takeaway.chinese

Eleven defendants, over a thousand sham marriages, and tens of millions of dollars, DOJ pulls back the curtain on what officials call one of the largest marriage fraud prosecutions in U.S. history. The Attorney General walks through a decade long scheme pairing Chinese nationals with paid American citizens in fake weddings, complete with staged photos, prenups, and a whole cottage industry of recruiters and officiants, before handing things to SDNY's U.S. Attorney and an HSI deputy to break down how the case actually came together. The press Q&A wanders well beyond the marriage fraud story, touching on a Southern Poverty Law Center indictment, the status of a certain high profile contempt referral, New York's second home tax fight, state fraud accountability, and a blunt, no nonsense answer about whether a certain "weaponization fund" is really dead. It's part law enforcement victory lap, part rapid fire news conference covering half a dozen other storylines at once.

Trump may have the pardon power, but all those people making bank off of shady contracts from the administration or doing pay-to-play can lose all that money through forfeiture and seizure laws already on the books. Taxpayers are going to want their money back. And why are Chinese nationals continuing to bribe the president of the United States—and does his soft-on-China policies have anything to do with it? Plus: Trump used a catering cart to sneak out of Turkey, the Dems need to do a better job highlighting the fact that the White House is doing socialist-style company takeovers, and the National Guard will now be in DC until 2029.Amanda Carpenter joins Tim Miller.show notes: Amanda's Bulwark piece on undoing Trump's age of corruption Amanda's event with Protect Democracy and Vox on Aug. 19 NYT story on Chinese national who gave $100 million to Trump's cryptocurrency company CATO on the government's ownership stakes in companies

A.M. Edition for Aug. 11. Anthropic tries to shore up pre-IPO investor confidence amid growing public backlash against AI. Plus, Wisconsin's Democratic gubernatorial primary pits the party's establishment against the far left. And WSJ's Chelsey Dulaney explains how American tourists with an insatiable wanderlust are boosting Europe's economies – whether locals like it or not. Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Bill Gertz reports a Pentagon official's attendance at a People's Liberation Army (PLA) celebration has sparked fears of a "defeatist" accommodation policy toward Beijing. Critics argue that seeking "respectful relations" with a Leninist regime is interpreted as subservience and weakness. This shift is reportedly influenced by concerns over Chinese control of rare earth minerals. China continues its global expansion and military bullying against neighbors like the Philippinesand Japan. Gertz warns that the U.S. education system is failing to inform the public about the threats of China's high-tech totalitarian system, which seeks to dominate through economic and military coercion. (11)

Scott Harold explains the U.S. and Japan are adopting a "walking quietly and carrying a big stick" approach to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan. This strategy involves creating a "hellscape" of thousands of drones and missiles to make an amphibious assault impossibly risky for Beijing. While Japan's official documents avoid explicitly naming Taiwan to prevent escalation, its leadership views a conflict as a survival-endangering situation. China's attempts to annex portions of the Western Pacific as domestic waters pose a direct threat to the global economy. Persistent deterrence remains essential, as the Chinese military currently lacks high-end operational experience and faces leadership purges. (10)

TABLE OF CONTENTS JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW, 8-10-2026.John Hardie reports North Korea is deploying a specialized unit equipped with KN-23 and KN-24 short-range ballistic missiles to assist Russia's war efforts. This shipment, potentially totaling 120 missiles, significantly bolsters Russia's magazine depth as it continues pounding Ukrainian cities. The relationship is mutually beneficial: Russia receives much-needed munitions and troops, while North Korea gains combat experience and technical assistance for its satellite and missile programs. Ukraine, facing a critical shortage of air defense interceptors, is seeking to use Starlink within Russian territory to hunt and strike these missile launchers before they can fire. (1)Ernesto Araújo and Alejandro Peña Esclusa report Venezuelan negotiators have established a timeline for a political transition, aiming to restore rights and select new electoral authorities by December. However, there are significant concerns regarding the lack of a firm election date and the ongoing militarization of the Bolivarian revolution. Simultaneously, diplomatic relations between Brazil and the U.S. have deteriorated, resulting in the U.S. revoking the credentials of Brazil's ambassador. In Colombia, new president Abelardo de la Espriella has launched a decisive military response against narco-terrorism, a move that regional leaders hope will dismantle the cross-border havens used by Venezuelan-linked criminal groups. (2)Malcolm Hoenlein discusses a new mutual defense pact between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan that has emerged to counter Iranian influence and the Muslim Brotherhood. Meanwhile, in Gaza, empirical data from UNICEF and the WHO challenges international narratives of famine, showing malnutrition rates are actually lower than in many neighboring countries. Theft of aid by Hamas remains a primary obstacle to relief efforts. In Iran, the regime faces severe domestic instability due to energy and water shortages, yet it continues to make extreme "non-negotiable" demands of the U.S., including $300 billion in reparations, while escalating public executions to silence internal dissent. (3)David Daoud explains Iran is currently leveraging negotiations with the U.S. to secure a ceasefire that protects Hezbollah from further Israeli military pressure while allowing the group to rebuild. Critics argue that U.S. security assistance to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) is a poor investment, as the LAF lacks the political will to disarm Hezbollah within its own borders. While a fragile ceasefire has shifted active war toward localized "policing operations" and skirmishes, Hezbollah explicitly rejects any linkage between an Israeli withdrawal and its own disarmament. The Trump administration is reportedly prioritizing "quiet" in Lebanon, which has forced Israeli forces into a more reactive posture. (4)Mariam Wahba reports the Sudanese civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), now entering its fourth year, has left over 400,000 dead. The conflict has evolved into a complex proxy war; the UAE supports the RSF to gain access to gold mines, while Egypt and Turkey lean toward the SAF. Iran has further complicated the battlefield by selling drones and hardware to both factions. Although neither side is seen as morally superior, civilians frequently celebrate when the SAF liberates territory from the RSF. Sudanese activists continue to call for a transition to civilian government despite the ongoing violence. (5)Bridget Toomey reports the Houthis have escalated their regional campaign by striking Saudi Arabia's Jazan refinery, demonstrating their ability to disrupt global energy markets despite recent defense pacts. Within Yemen, the Houthis are intensifying attacks on government-held ports like Mocha and oil-rich regions like Marib to expand their territorial control. These strikes often target civilian displacement camps, using ballistic missiles and drones to sow terror and gain leverage in future negotiations. While Saudi Arabia pursues diplomatic off-ramps through Omani mediation, the Houthis continue to use military pressure to force an agreement favorable to their long-term dominance. (6)Edmund Fitton-Brown describes the Houthis' methodical campaign, likely coordinated with Iran, to intimidate Saudi Arabia and prevent its entry into the Abraham Accords. Recent strikes on Mocha and Jazan highlight a resurgence of the 12-year-old Yemeni civil war, which remains a primary source of regional instability. While a new Sunni alliance between Pakistan and Turkey offers symbolic support to the Saudis, it lacks the practical military "teeth" to intervene on the ground. Meanwhile, the UAE is asserting itself as an agile regional powerhouse, investing in high-tech infrastructure and maintaining an uncompromising stance against the Muslim Brotherhood. (7)Janatyn Sayeh analyzes the appointment of Mohsen Rezaei, an original IRGC veteran, to the Supreme National Security Council, signaling a return to hardline, ideologically driven decision-making in Tehran. Rezaei, linked to past international terrorism, reinforces the regime's aggressive stance against the U.S. and Israel. Iran currently refuses to engage in talks until the U.S. meets extreme demands, including unfreezing all assets and paying billions in reparations. The regime utilizes a "good cop, bad cop" strategy between factions to maximize leverage, but remains unified in its goals of expanding its nuclear program and securing regional dominance through its "resistance axis." (8)Conrad Black reports Prime Minister Mark Carney is under pressure to revitalize Canada's economy 16 months after his election. Despite being a "treasure house" of resources, Canada suffers from lengthy project delays caused by redundant provincial regulations and indigenous land claims. Black notes that Canada's public sector workforce is disproportionately large, representing 12% of the population, and calls for corporate tax cuts to foster competitiveness. While Carney is exploring diversified trade, the U.S. remains Canada's indispensable partner, accounting for roughly 64% of its trade. Carney's political survival depends on achieving the kind of robust growth seen south of the border. (9)Scott Harold explains the U.S. and Japan are adopting a "walking quietly and carrying a big stick" approach to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan. This strategy involves creating a "hellscape" of thousands of drones and missiles to make an amphibious assault impossibly risky for Beijing. While Japan's official documents avoid explicitly naming Taiwan to prevent escalation, its leadership views a conflict as a survival-endangering situation. China's attempts to annex portions of the Western Pacific as domestic waters pose a direct threat to the global economy. Persistent deterrence remains essential, as the Chinese military currently lacks high-end operational experience and faces leadership purges. (10)Bill Gertz reports a Pentagon official's attendance at a People's Liberation Army (PLA) celebration has sparked fears of a "defeatist" accommodation policy toward Beijing. Critics argue that seeking "respectful relations" with a Leninist regime is interpreted as subservience and weakness. This shift is reportedly influenced by concerns over Chinese control of rare earth minerals. China continues its global expansion and military bullying against neighbors like the Philippinesand Japan. Gertz warns that the U.S. education system is failing to inform the public about the threats of China's high-tech totalitarian system, which seeks to dominate through economic and military coercion. (11)

Anthropic said new Claude models will watermark generated text to satisfy the EU AI Act, and it's out courting investors for a possibly record-breaking IPO. Apple's glass iPhone stayed on track, YouTube doubled its monetization bar, and FlightAware sued Kalshi. Links Anthropic says new Claude models will embed watermarks in generated text and C2PA metadata in files to comply with the EU AI Act, and it will update past models (The Register) Sources: Anthropic is courting investors for what could be the biggest IPO yet, touting rapid growth and plans to address mounting public backlash against AI (The Wall Street Journal) Sources: Apple remains on track to launch a glass-centric design overhaul of the iPhone Pro line in 2027, countering rumors that led Jefferies to downgrade AAPL (Bloomberg) YouTube says that from February 1, new creators will need double, or 8,000, watch hours over the past year or 20M Shorts views in the past 90 days to earn money (TechCrunch) Zuckerberg's long essay returns to his "open" AI arguments at an opportune time, as Chinese open-weight models are "close enough" to frontier at much less cost (Spyglass) Flight tracking platform FlightAware sues Kalshi in New York, alleging Kalshi is using its data without permission to let users bet on flight cancellations (The Wall Street Journal) Subscribe to the ad-free feed.

Rescuers worked through the night looking for survivors trapped under dozens of collapsed buildings. The cities of Cali and Pereira were among the places worst hit. Also on the programme: A Palestinian family in the West Bank says their house has been surrounded by Israeli settlers who they say have cut off their water and electricity; and Chinese authorities are warning of a rise in fake matchmaking agencies preying on the country's growing number of single men. (Photo: Dozens of buildings have collapsed in the city of Cali. Credit: Reuters)

Solar demand remains strong, storage is scaling fast, and inverter technology is becoming more central to how modern power systems actually function. But the conversation around inverters is no longer just about efficiency, bankability, or price. As these devices take on more intelligence — managing batteries, supporting grid stability, and communicating more directly with the wider system — they are also being treated as a new point of strategic vulnerability. In both Europe and the US, policymakers are starting to respond accordingly.Host Sylvia Leyva Martinez is joined by Joe Shangraw, research analyst at Wood Mackenzie covering solar inverter markets, to examine what that shift means in practice. Their core argument is that inverter policy is moving beyond trade protection and into a more complicated mix of cybersecurity, industrial strategy, and grid risk. They unpack why Europe's March decision to block public EU funding for projects using Chinese-made inverters matters beyond its immediate scope, and why the region's dependence on Chinese vendors — especially in utility-scale string inverters and integrated battery-plus-inverter systems — makes any attempt to diversify more complex than simply switching suppliers. A large part of the discussion focuses on the FCC's July decision to add foreign power inverters to its Covered List, where the real issue is not just whether the headlines overstated the impact, but how narrowly or broadly the rule will ultimately be applied. Shangraw explains that the current language appears closely tied to communications hardware, especially wireless-enabled devices, which creates a more nuanced picture than an outright market shutdown. That distinction matters because it affects not only which new products fall in scope, but how developers, manufacturers, and asset owners start thinking about software updates, grid-code compliance, and long-term procurement risk. The challenge is no longer just cost competitiveness. It is whether an inverter can remain usable, updateable, and policy-safe over the life of the asset.The episode also looks ahead to the next set of decisions facing the industry: whether Europe expands restrictions beyond publicly funded projects, how quickly US and allied manufacturers can localise enough of the supply chain to qualify under tougher domestic-content rules, and where practical bottlenecks are most likely to emerge. The takeaway is that inverter policy is becoming a test case for a much bigger energy-transition problem: how to reduce genuine security risks without creating new deployment constraints. For developers, manufacturers, and policymakers alike, the inverter market is no longer just a technology contest. It is becoming a test of how the energy transition handles security, industrial policy, and system reliability all at once.The report and note and Sylvia refers can be found here: Solar Solar Inverter Market Share Report 2026Ban on inverters from high-risk countries, led by China, to affect 14% of EU solar demand through 2030This episode is brought to you by twentytwo & brand – a marketing and PR agency built specifically for energy leaders.Lots of agencies say they work with energy companies. twentytwo & brand was built for them. They've partnered with more than 120 companies driving the energy transition – from growth-stage startups to globally recognised industry leaders. Media relations, brand design, video, paid advertising and community engagement – they cover it all under one roof. No onboarding lag, no industry crash course – they speak your language on day one. If you're ready to sharpen your story and supercharge your marketing, find them here. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Watch the full podcast! https://chinauncensored.tv/programs/podcast-346 The New York Times has published a series of articles that portray Shen Yun, the classical Chinese dance and music company as a cult-like institution where children are abused and workers are underpaid. We sat down with two of the dancers who were subjects of the documentary "Unbroken: The Untold Story of Shen Yun" to talk about what it's like to be in Shen Yun and live on its campus.

President Trump signed an order to overhaul the childhood vaccine schedule. More than 130 people have been killed, with hundreds injured after a deadly earthquake in Colombia. According to the Washington Post, Trump took a secret flight home from Turkey in an elaborate ruse. A Chinese rocket carrying a satellite exploded seconds after launch.  Plus, a massive energy project has been rerouted to save a “Dobby” memorial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this episode, Gregor and Sean dig into a wave of “runaway AI” stories, including Anthropic and OpenAI disclosing that their models accessed outside organizations during cyber evaluations, and Amazon reporting a staggering budget overrun blamed on bad agent loops. They explore why most of these incidents trace back to human decisions rather than models breaking free, and the awkward reality that today’s systems can bill you for tokens without reliably counting them. They also talk about the “Kimi moment.” Moonshot AI‘s open weight model has closed the gap with frontier models like ChatGPT and Claude at a remarkable pace, and the hosts unpack what it means for open weight strategies and how chip scarcity is pushing Chinese labs to innovate. As always, the episode wraps up with a few standout Hacker News threads, including a JetBrains test of a “caveman speak” skill that promised big token savings, how refactoring can cut input token costs, the release of CodePen 2.0, and a build of Doom that renders through SQL queries.Sponsorship inquiries:sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post SED News: The Kimi Moment, Runaway AI, and Tokenmaxxing appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

In this week's Stansberry Investor Hour, Dan welcomes Brent Johnson back to the show. Brent is the CEO of Puerto Rico-based Santiago Capital and creator of the famous "dollar milkshake theory." He has more than 13,000 subscribers on the Santiago Capital Substack.   Brent kicks things off by expressing his optimism for the U.S. and believes that, despite the supply-chain issues the country is facing, it will make the changes needed to come out of the crisis. That's not to say that there won't be pain along the way, but Brent says it will be better than most people expect. Additionally, he says that criticisms of the U.S. and the dollar are valid, but relative to other countries, they're in a much better position than their peers. And he tells listeners that you can still buy gold without being bearish on the dollar. (0:00)   Next, Brent says that there's no need to be worried about gold overtaking the dollar as a reserve asset in central banks. A key contributor to that has been gold going up while Treasurys have gone down. But Brent's research shows that on a global scale, government bonds have been falling across the board. (The exception is China, due to companies not wanting to buy Chinese stocks or real estate and getting tax breaks from buying Chinese bonds). Brent then explains how the dollar will become broken the stronger it becomes, which would create more pressure on countries that have debt in dollars and could lead to a currency crisis and a great credit reset. And he shows how the U.S. could weaponize the dollar against companies that are indebted to it. (15:08)   Finally, Brent criticizes the mentality that it doesn't matter which fiat currency you're holding, because they're all going to crash. He says that folks who work, own businesses, or have exposure to the geopolitical landscape should care about fiat levels. A sharp rise in one currency compared with another has been a key component in every global financial crisis over the past 50 years. And Brent states that the order of the currency declines matters. Folks who retreat from the market out of fear could be missing out on all the opportunities that happen before a major crash occurs. (34:04)

Plus: Trading firms sign up for a real-time feed of Truth Social posts. And New York's pied-à-terre tax hits a legal hurdle. Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A diagnosis can feel like a single label, but some conditions reveal a wider terrain — one that spans immune response, cultural rhythm, and slow imbalance over time.In this conversation with Brendan Kelly, we explore long COVID through the lens of classical Chinese medicine, looking at how frameworks like the Shang Han Lun's cold-to-heat progression and the Wen Bing's epidemic theory make sense of a condition with over two hundred possible symptoms. We discuss treatment not as a single formula, but as traditions blended and matched to where a disease has been and where it's heading.We also touch on why epidemics are never purely individual, and how a culture's own excess heat may shape its susceptibility to illness.Listen in for a conversation that brings clinical experience and classical theory to a condition modern medicine still struggles to treat.

What if the way back to yourself isn't through more information, more spirituality, or more thinking, but through your body?In this grounding episode of the High Vibin' It Podcast, Kelsey Aida and Lynnsey Robinson sit down with Mingtong Gu, internationally recognized Qigong teacher, healer, and founder of The Chi Center, to explore what it means to come home to your body.Mingtong shares his personal journey from illness and disconnection to discovering Qigong and realizing that the body can become a place of healing, presence, and connection. Together, they explore why so many people feel disconnected from their bodies, how technology and AI are changing our relationship with reality, and why embodiment may be more important than ever.They dive into Mingtong's concept of the three worlds: the mental world, the digital world, and the real world of the body. They discuss the importance of feeling instead of constantly thinking, spending time in nature, and creating a deeper relationship with the body.Mingtong also guides Kelsey and Lynnsey through an embodied meditation designed to help listeners reconnect with their bodies and experience a deeper sense of presence.If you've been feeling disconnected, overstimulated, or stuck in your head, this conversation is an invitation to slow down, feel, and come home to yourself.✨ What You'll Discover:Why your body is essential to healing and self-discoveryThe three worlds: mental, digital, and realHow technology and AI can disconnect us from embodimentWhy the body isn't something to escape or controlHow nature and presence can bring you back to yourselfWhy embodiment matters in the age of AIHow to build a deeper relationship with your bodyA guided meditation for reconnecting with your body✨ The Embodied MeditationMingtong guides listeners through an Initiation Meditation centered around three powerful reminders:Without this body, I do not exist as a human being.Without this body, I cannot experience life as a human being.Without this body, my soul cannot evolve in this lifetime.The meditation invites you to move beyond labels, stories, and overthinking and reconnect with a deeper sense of presence, wholeness, and aliveness.✨ Want More?In the extended Patreon conversation, Mingtong shares more about his personal connection to Columbus, Ohio, his relationship with the digital world, Chinese historical films, creativity and AI, and how he personally balances the mental, digital, and real worlds.Join us on Patreon for early access, extended episodes, exclusive oracle card readings, bonus content, and behind-the-scenes fun—all for just a few bucks a month. The first 50 members will receive a FREE Manifestation Toolkit when we hit our community goal!

FULL SHOW-Step into the hilarious, slightly unhinged world of late-night talk radio with Walter Sterling in this episode of the ultimate overnight 'theater of the mind'. From Walter's legendary rant on corporate 'process speak' (why can't we just rake the leaves?) to the unbelievable horror of a college graduate who brought her helicopter parents to a Chinese restaurant job interview, this broadcast is social commentary at its finest. Plus: a mind-bending deep dive into the conspiracy of Tartaria—the erased empire that allegedly harnessed wireless free energy from the ether—underwhelming government UFO disclosures, and the common-sense business logic of why elbowing Caitlin Clark is technically corporate asset tampering.

Miist was five years old when her parents removed themselves from her life. Not through death — through choice. As she tells me in this episode, that distinction made the wound deeper, not shallower. She knew they could come back. They simply didn't.By 28, she had a terminal cancer diagnosis and doctors telling her she had a month, maybe three. And here's the part that stopped me: she still doesn't hold any bad feeling toward that diagnosis. It's the thing that finally brought her family back into the room with her.She picked up a ukulele during treatment. She didn't write her first song until she was 34. Today her music has charted on Billboard, she's the first native Chinese artist to reach the Pop AC chart, and she hosts a top-ranked mental health podcast.This conversation goes somewhere I didn't expect. We talk about loneliness after loss — the grief that arrives with no funeral, no casserole, no one checking in — and what it actually takes to come back from it.Miist wrote a song for a young man who passed alone in his apartment in Japan. He had food. He had shelter. He had nobody. She kept thinking about all the strangers he must have walked past on any given day, and how one moment of real eye contact might have been enough to hold him a little longer. That song, "Could You Lend Me a Smile," now exists in 16 languages.Out of it came the idea we spend much of this episode on: the 15-second action. Small enough that nobody can claim they don't have time. Smile at someone. Be silly. Be grateful. Say a kind word. Remind someone that you love them.We recorded this on my 65th birthday, which made one part land hard for me. Miist asked when the last time was that someone called you for no reason at all, just to say they love you. I told her about the most viral Substack post I've ever written — it was about calling my father on an ordinary day, for no occasion. It went everywhere because almost nobody does it.WHAT WE COVERWhy abandonment can cut deeper than death, and how the earliest wound becomes the root of everything built on top of itHow Miist pushed away her closest childhood friends, and the apology she eventually wrote as a songChoosing, in advance, to sit inside the grief of losing her dog rather than reaching for anything that would make it stopThe three days she asked her vet for, and what her whole family learned from themReconnecting with and forgiving the father she hadn't seen in over 20 yearsBeing discovered by producer Narada Michael Walden — and being asked to sing at the piano where Aretha Franklin recorded "Respect"The Kindness Kube and the five actions on itUsing music intentionally to move through anger, sadness, and back toward joyWhy losing an old habit that no longer serves you can feel like its own kind of lossWhy both of us say plainly: we are still healingABOUT MIISTMiist is a multilingual recording artist, songwriter, and podcast host who began her professional music career at 34 after being discovered by acclaimed producer Narada Michael Walden. She's a Teen Cancer America Ambassador and the founder of the World Smile Initiative, a nonprofit built around bringing moments of relief and light to people who are struggling. Her podcast, Make Me Smile with Miist, blends original music, personal storytelling, and research, and each episode closes with a 15-second action listeners can take that day. The book of the same name is now available.

This episode is a wake-up call for anyone who thinks they're safe from the reach of the Chinese Communist Party. The speaker delves into a report from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which reveals that three Chinese state-owned carriers are still deeply embedded in the US internet infrastructure, despite being kicked out of the American phone business years ago. This is not just a matter of selling phone service; it's about the Chinese government's ability to quietly surveil and manipulate American internet users.The speaker explains that the FCC's actions, while well-intentioned, don't go far enough. Revoking a license doesn't pull the equipment out of the wall or sever the network relationships. The Chinese carriers can still collect data and push hidden software changes, making it difficult for the US to regain control. The speaker also highlights the case of TP-Link, a Chinese company that controls a significant portion of the American home and small business router market, and has been linked to compromised routers used in attacks on government agencies and defense contractors.The speaker also touches on the Internet of Things (IoT) army that's quietly installed in our homes, from smart cameras to garage door openers. These devices can be used to track our movements and collect data, which can be used against us. The speaker emphasizes that we've essentially installed this surveillance system for ourselves, one Amazon shipment at a time.This episode is a must-listen for anyone who wants to understand the extent of the Chinese Communist Party's reach into the US internet infrastructure. The speaker provides a clear and concise explanation of the issue and offers practical advice on how to protect yourself. Don't miss this eye-opening conversation that will leave you wondering what's really going on in your own home.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode of the Immigration Lawyer's Toolbox Podcast, host John Khosravi sits down with Jeff Goldman, Esq., founder of Goldman & Partners Immigration and co-founder of Build Talent Labs, for a candid look at how a "serendipitous" career turn into immigration law became a 30+ year, 32-person firm built almost entirely on referrals from the client who talked him into immigration law after a real estate closing, to the EB-1A case for an MIT researcher that opened the door to a decade of extraordinary-ability petitions, to how he set (and steadily raised) his fees at Testa, Hurwitz & Israel and beyond. Jeff also breaks down his current work at Build Talent Labs, the cap-exempt H-1B, J-1, and O-1 agent sponsorship model he co-founded with his daughter Danielle, his eight years as immigration advisor to the Governor of Massachusetts, and what it's really like working with CBP at Logan Airport, including a firsthand story of getting a client released after 48 hours in secondary inspection. Connect with Jeff Goldman, Esq.:

What if 2026 isn't asking you to do more… but asking you to get braver? What if the pressure you're feeling isn't a sign you're behind— but a sign the moment is here for you to be seen, to move, and to trust what's lighting up inside you?In this episode, I sit down with Anna Tsui to explore why 2026 is the Year of the Fire Horse in Chinese astrology… and how to work with its wild, fast, heart-led energy without getting consumed by it. We unpack what fire reveals (and burns away), why visibility becomes non-negotiable, and how to stay grounded as the collective gets louder—so you can move with courage, clarity, and aligned momentum in your life and business.About the Guest: Anna Tsui is an international serial entrepreneur, bestselling author, and spiritual catalyst. Her mission is to help heart-centered business owners become fearless leaders in the new era.In this conversation, you'll discover:How to harness Fire Horse energy for bold visibility and aligned business growth without burning outWhy 2026 marks a shift into personal sovereignty (and what that means for your leadership)The grounding practices that let you move fast, stay intuitive, and channel fire into momentum instead of chaosThis episode is an invitation to feel the fire in your heart, honor the pace of your nervous system, and take bold action from alignment—not adrenaline.References Mentioned:Get Instant Access to the Fire Era at a Soul Guide Discount.Purchase Anna's BookConnect with Anna on InstagramTimestamps:01:08 Meet Anna Tsui01:38 Memories and Mystical Experiences03:47 The Year of the Fire Horse04:39 Historical Context of the Fire Horse07:31 Human Design and the Fire Horse08:57 Navigating the Fire Horse Energy11:51 Harnessing Fire Energy for Personal Growth18:33 Visibility and Boldness in the Fire Era32:43 The Power of Fire Energy34:12 Spiritual Niche and Audience Readiness43:33 Daily Practices for Harnessing Energy49:18 Planning with Soul AlignmentSTAY CONNECTED:Discover the Human Design chart of your business, and how it's naturally designed to create momentum, visibility, and aligned clients. Run the Right Chart: Free chart and trainingSUBSCRIBE on SubstackFOLLOW on InstagramFOLLOW on FacebookSUBSCRIBE on YouTubeReady to use your Spiritual Gifts to attract soul-aligned clients? BOOK a Soul Blueprint Intuitive Business AssessmentLeave a review for Soul Alive Radio (and we'll read it on the air!)

Traveling through China can be more than ticking famous landmarks off your list! You can watch Sichuan Opera performers change faces in the blink of an eye, or even learn a few acrobatics moves to impress your friends…In this episode of Takeaway Chinese, we explore China's intangible cultural heritage through traveling — and pick up some useful Chinese words and expressions along the way!Watch the full episode and travel beyond the tourist trail.

A.M. Edition for Aug. 10. Iran dials up its demands in talks to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Plus, Meta embraces open-weight AI models in a bid to blunt the appeal of cheaper Chinese competition. And WSJ finance editor Alex Frangos breaks down how a payment network backed by the Russian government reveals the limits of Western efforts to economically isolate Moscow. Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Stephen Moss, Part Two: Moss explores the Raven, a bird of deep mythology and intelligence, appearing in Norselegends as Odin's messengers and in modern culture like Game of Thrones. Though often seen as harbingers of doom in works by Shakespeare and Poe, Ravens are highly adaptable and have successfully recolonized urban areas. The narrative shifts to the Cormorant, whose guano fueled a 19th-century fertilizer boom that enriched businessmen while exploiting Chinese indentured laborers. This led to synthetic fertilizers, which Moss argues have caused a decline in farmland birds like the Gray Partridge and Skylark. A tragic highlight is Mao Zedong's campaign against the Tree Sparrow, which triggered a massive insect population boom and a famine killing up to 50 million people. Moss also recounts the "Emu War," where the Emu successfully evaded the Australian army's machine guns. The Snowy Egret's near-extinction due to the fashion industry's demand for plumes is credited with sparking the founding of the Audubon Society by women activists. Finally, the Emperor Penguin is presented as a modern "miner's canary," signaling the urgent threat of the climate crisis to global biodiversity. (2)

Serhii Plokhy, Part Two: The second part focuses on the 2022 full-scale invasion, defined by Putin's catastrophic miscalculation that his troops would be welcomed as liberators. Instead, Ukraine demonstrated remarkable resilience under President Zelenskyy and military leaders like General Oleksandr Syrskyi. Plokhy highlights the "outright criminality" of Russian tactics, specifically the reckless use of nuclear sites like Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia as military shields and tools of international blackmail. He notes that the defense of sites like the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupolbecame global symbols of Ukrainian resistance. The war has triggered profound global shifts, including Germany's "Zeitenwende" and Japan's move toward providing military support. Former "interlocutors" like Emmanuel Macronhave shifted from seeking accommodation to joining the US-led coalition, while diplomatic mediation has fallen to leaders like President Erdoğan of Turkey. Furthermore, Ukraine's effective defense has likely contributed to stability in East Asia by discouraging a Chinese military adventure in Taiwan. While Putin views the war through an imperial lens, NATO has rediscovered its purpose in defending the international order. Plokhy concludes that while Putin is destroying Russia's future, the war may eventually force the nation to rethink itself as a modern state rather than an empire. (2)

Abdul El-Sayed says it's “playing gotcha politics” to question him about Hasan Piker talking about America deserving 9/11. Rolling Stone gives a glowing write up on Hasan Piker and throws him on the cover. Dana had to fight AI for it to admit that Hasan Piker said things he actually said. Dana exposes some of the awful commentary that the Democrats' new poster boy has said in his past. Chicago Sky's DiJonai Carrington clotheslines Sophie Cunningham during a layup then runs to social media to scream “White Privilege”. Former NBA stars are declaring for the WNBA draft to prove a point.  A California city declares a state of emergency after a cyberattack on their computer systems. Who is behind it? The UK Ministry of Defense launched an emergency security response after discovering that Chinese-made cameras on the Royal Navy's K3 Scout drones were secretly transmitting data.Thank you for supporting our sponsors that make The Dana Show possible…Alliance Defending Freedomhttps://JoinADF.com/DanaAlliance Defending Freedom is on the front lines defending the freedoms and values that matter. Join the fight today. Byrnahttps://Byrna.com/DanaTrusted by law enforcement, security professionals, and everyday Americans—defend yourself and your family with Byrna.HumanNhttps://Humann.com/DanaGet the limited edition Watermelon Flavor and find out how to get a FREE 30-day supply before they sell out.Patriot Mobilehttp://PatriotMobile.com/DANAVisit online or call 972-PATRIOT and use promo code DANA for a FREE month of service.Relief Factorhttps://www.ReliefFactor.comYou could be the next person sharing a Relief Factor success story. Get started today with the 3-Week QuickStart for only $17.76.Ghost Bedhttps://GhostBed.com/DANAGhostBed has the cooling luxury mattress you need for the best summer sleep. Use code DANA for an extra 10% off sitewide.Webroothttps://Webroot.com/DanaSave 60% off Webroot. Protect your devices. Protect your family. Protect your peace of mind. Live a better digital life with Webroot. Noble Goldhttps://NobleGoldInvestments.com/DanaIf you want to see how physical gold and silver could fit into your portfolio, download Noble Gold Investments FREE Wealth Protection KitSubscribe today and stay in the loop on all things news with The Dana Show. Follow us here for more daily clips, updates, and commentary:YoutubeFacebookInstagramXMore InfoWebsite

This week on Sinica, I welcome back Evan Osnos of The New Yorker, whose marvelous new essay, “The Future, Made in China,” chronicles a tech-focused return trip to Beijing, where he lived from 2005 to 2013 — first for the Chicago Tribune, then as The New Yorker's China correspondent. Evan is the author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, which won the National Book Award, as well as Wildland: The Making of America's Fury and The Haves and Have-Yachts.His essay is far more than another breathless account of China's advances in robotics and electric vehicles. It's a meditation on what China's technological ascent means for the United States, for how both societies are organized, and for the rest of us, whose futures increasingly seem to be wagered by two small circles of powerful men in Beijing and Washington. We talk about the Xiaomi Hyperfactory, “Chinamaxxing,” the export control debate, and the deeper contest Evan identifies: not democracy versus authoritarianism, but humanism versus scientism.3:04 – Walking Beijing's streets again: quieter, richer, more surveilled11:26 – The Xiaomi Hyperfactory: choreography, awe, and what's actually real18:10 – Doomed to coexist: Evan's message for the American reader24:15 – Schrödinger's China: joke or juggernaut?27:16 – The limits of knowability in an increasingly opaque system31:56 – Threat narratives vs. “Chinamaxxing”: America's two China conversations43:20 – “Thank Trump”: America's self-inflicted wounds47:29 – Revisiting the Sullivan doctrine and export controls53:10 – Mankind 2000: humanism, scientism, and rival oligarchies1:02:48 – Convergence: arriving at dystopia from opposite directions1:07:21 – Self-strengthening redux: Levenson and America's meum-verum gap1:17:53 – The other Sputnik moment: the backlash against tech oligarchyPaying It ForwardYi-Ling Liu, author of The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet — Evan admires how her work grapples with the competition between scientism and humanism across national borders.Chang Che, who writes for The New Yorker and The Guardian — watching China's technological developments up close, “creating history in real time.”RecommendationsEvan: How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University by Theo Baker — the youngest-ever Polk Award winner on how a rising generation at Silicon Valley's feeder school perceives its opportunities and obligations. Also True Grit by Charles Portis — splendid, sentence-savoring dialogue.Kaiser: Butcher's Crossing by John Williams, author of Stoner — a Western with the same sentence-level craft; for fans of Melville and Cormac McCarthy.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode, Jacob Chastain sits down with Jennifer Serravallo to discuss Whole Book Comprehension and why knowledge building, sustained reading, and deep comprehension deserve a renewed place in today's classrooms. Together, they explore how literacy instruction has shifted over the past decade, why whole-book reading has become less common, and whether today's emphasis on knowledge-rich instruction is something new—or a return to what we've always known works. Jennifer also shares practical strategies for making whole-book teaching fit into real classrooms, how it connects with shorter texts and excerpts, and ways teachers and PLCs can begin strengthening comprehension instruction this school year. Whether you're a classroom teacher, coach, or school leader, this conversation will challenge the way you think about reading—and give you practical ideas you can use right away. **Announced in this episode is the new podcast from Jacob Chastain, The Golden Table. Click here to listen now.  Jennifer Serravallo is the author ofThe New York Times' bestselling The Reading Strategies Book 2.0 and The Writing Strategies Book. These and some of her other titles have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, and Chinese. Her popular books and resources help teachers make goal-directed, responsive, explicit strategy instruction doable in every classroom. Her newest titles are The Reading Strategies Book 2.0; Teaching Writing in Small Groups; A Teacher's Guide to Reading Conferences, and the assessment and teaching resource Complete Comprehension for Fiction and Nonfiction.

Last time we spoke about the ending of the Second Battle of Changsha. In late September and early October 1941, Chinese commander Chen Cheng planned an operation to retake Yichang, a strategic Yangtze River city whose control was essential for protecting the approach to Chongqing. Japanese forces were pulling back from Changsha, weakened by supply problems and casualties, which created an opportunity for Chen to intensify his campaign. Yichang had been captured by Japan in 1940, a defeat that Chen carried as a personal and political burden. He therefore moved to encircle the Japanese 13th Division inside Yichang and drive it to collapse. Although the Chinese held a clear manpower advantage—fourteen divisions against the encircled Japanese—progress was slowed by stubborn fighting from prepared, entrenched positions. The battle inside the city produced desperate close-quarters combat and heavy casualties, showing how the fate of Yichang and the wider defense of Chongqing were tightly linked.    #214 War hits the Pacific Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War.   The guns fell silent on October 9, 1941, as the Ninth War Zone's forces restored their pre-battle positions, marking the end of the Second Battle of Changsha. The balance sheet was grim on both sides, but it was China that bore the heavier cost. The Ninth Military Front suffered 70,672 killed, wounded, or missing. The concurrent Yichang offensive added a further 21,368 casualties to the Sixth Military Front, a force that outnumbered its Japanese opponents ten to one yet still failed to retake the city. By the time the dust settled, the Chinese army had lost nearly 100,000 men across both theatres. The Chinese command was frank, at least in private, about what had gone wrong. The Japanese had moved with a speed that recalled Blitzkrieg, advancing 130 kilometres in eleven days and withdrawing at twelve kilometres a day, catching the defenders perpetually off-balance. The 26th, 37th, 10th, and 74th Corps had been picked apart piecemeal rather than fighting in concert, the original plan to destroy the Japanese south of the Miluo River coming to nothing. Elite formations had paid a disproportionate price: the 74th Corps suffered 14,521 casualties, the 37th Corps 14,015, and the 58th Division alone lost 6,192 of its 11,907 men, nearly its entire fighting strength.   Yet none of this was the story the public would hear. On October 10th, China's National Day, radio stations announced the "Second Great Victory in Northern Hunan", the annihilation of over 40,000 enemy troops. Newspapers rushed out special editions. Congratulatory telegrams flooded in from government ministries and civic organizations. Senior officials seized on the moment: Sun Ke, Premier of the Executive Yuan, declared that the victory "laid the foundation for the counter-offensive and the recapture of Hankou and Guangzhou," while General Bai Chongxi called it "the pivotal moment for us to turn defeat into victory." Chiang Kai-shek, reading through the pages of triumphant commentary produced overnight by his propagandists, was reportedly impressed by their industry, if not convinced by their content. He had not wanted to call it a victory at all, but the political calculus was unavoidable: after four years of war, an exhausted nation needed the psychological sustenance that only "victory" could provide.   The gap between public performance and private reality was nowhere more visible than in the arrival of a twenty-two-member international press delegation on October 13th. Journalists from Britain, the United States, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Hong Kong, and major Chinese newspapers were flown to Changsha and carefully guided through selected battlefields, where they inspected mountains of war trophies and heard testimony from soldiers and civilians. They left satisfied, presenting their war souvenirs—swords, binoculars, Japanese military flags—to their audiences back home as proof of Chinese heroism and Japanese defeat. Both China and Japan were claiming victory simultaneously. The only conclusion the foreign press could draw was that one side was lying, and it was not the side that had shown them the evidence.   Chiang Kai-shek's real verdict came at the Third Nanyue Military Conference, held from October 16 to 21. His anger was withering. He condemned his generals for their obsession with defending sprawling outer perimeter lines while leaving city centres barely fortified, a mentality so rigid, he said, that the Japanese could announce the exact time of their advance and withdrawal in advance and still execute it on schedule without interference. "Generals, what a disgrace this is!" On the failure to capture prisoners, only 263 prisoners were claimed across the entire front, of whom only 16 names were actually published, he was almost incredulous: "We can definitely defeat the enemy, capture many enemy prisoners, and seize countless enemy weapons! Even if we cannot capture ten thousand prisoners, we should at least capture a thousand! If not a thousand, then at least a hundred! But now, you don't even have ten!" The conference handed down punishments to match the rhetoric. Liao Lingqi, commander of the shattered 58th Division, was sentenced to death for desertion and shot on October 22nd. His men were so outraged that three regimental commanders resigned in protest; the division was pulled from the order of battle entirely and given three months to rebuild. Li Yutang, commander of the 10th Corps, was dismissed—though the Third Battle of Changsha would begin before his replacement could take post, and he would be reinstated to play a key role in the city's defence.   On the Japanese side, the 11th Army acknowledged 1,670 killed, 5,184 wounded, and 14 missing, far fewer than Chinese claims, though post-war regimental histories suggest the true figure was higher. Lieutenant General Anami, who had championed the operation, found himself stung by the charge that the battle had served mainly as material for Chinese propaganda. On November 23rd, he reportedly reacted with visible displeasure when someone in his headquarters said as much aloud.  Anami's annoyance was easy enough to understand, but the accusation carried a troubling degree of accuracy. The Second Battle of Changsha had yielded no decisive strategic gain and no substantial alteration in the military balance. What it did generate, rather effectively, was a story and by the autumn of 1941, stories were one of the few things China still had in plentiful supply. The most consequential struggles were taking place not along the Miluo River, but in foreign ministries and embassies, in Washington and Moscow, in the messages passing between Chongqing and London, and in the increasingly strained calculations of statesmen trying to determine, amid rapidly changing circumstances, whom to support and for how long.   For Chiang Kai-shek, the challenge was never merely military. It was structural, and had been so from the outset. He had always seen clearly, precisely because he understood China's weakness, that Japan could not be defeated by China alone. The country lacked the industrial base, the logistical reach, and after four years of relentless attrition more and more the manpower needed to force a decisive result on the battlefield. China's survival depended on making its war inseparable from the wars of other powers. Since 1937, Chiang's diplomacy had pursued that single objective: convincing enough great powers that their interests were aligned with China's, and holding that coalition together long enough for Japan to be subdued. That effort turned out to be vastly more difficult than it ought to have been.   The problem started with the international order in which the war emerged. Chiang had hoped to assemble a concert of allies willing to help defend China against Japanese aggression. He was blocked not just by the reluctance of neutral states to aid China, but by the speed with which alliances shifted in the opening years of the Second World War. He had never welcomed the prospect of a general European conflict, correctly fearing that it would push China even further to the margins of world attention. Even so, he recognized that once the lines had hardened between the imperial democracies and fascism, new alignments might become possible. From his perspective, the growing amity between Berlin and Moscow was therefore disastrous. He had been eager to draw the USSR into war against Japan. Instead, the Soviets were now effectively aligned with the Nazis, who were themselves allied with Tokyo.   The world created after Versailles had already enraged many Chinese. After all, the May Fourth demonstrations of 1919 had arisen directly from the settlement reached at the Paris Peace Conference. Yet that older order had at least possessed recognizable anchors, especially the dominance of the two great European empires and the United States. Now those empires were weakening, and no one could say with confidence what the new geopolitical order would be. For all Chiang knew, Germany might emerge as Europe's new dominant power. The early years of the European war produced a bewildering spectacle of diplomatic realignment.   The Nationalist government had previously enjoyed a short-lived flirtation with Nazi Germany. In fact, Hitler's regime continued supplying Chiang with munitions in the first months of China's war against Japan. The Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 had theoretically joined Germany, Italy, and Japan into the Axis, but mutual distrust prevented them from forming anything like a fully coherent alliance. Chiang found it useful to imply to Western powers that he might be pushed into closer alignment with Germany, a particularly disturbing possibility for the USSR, which faced enemies in both Europe and Asia. But eventually the contradictions in German policy toward East Asia became too severe. In April 1938, Germany yielded to Japanese pressure and ended its support for China.   Britain offered little meaningful help. Neville Chamberlain became prime minister in May 1937 at the head of a Conservative-led National Government, and was quickly overwhelmed by the deteriorating European situation. If Czechoslovakia was for him a "far-off country of which we know nothing," China's fate was even more distant and obscure to many,  perhaps most  policymakers in London. The Nationalists had more success in cultivating the United States. At the Nine-Power Conference in Brussels in November 1937, the Chinese delegation failed to persuade Washington to impose sanctions on Japan and confront it directly. By the middle of 1938, however, American views were beginning to shift. As Japan pushed deeper into southern China, it became increasingly obvious that the occupied territory would be closed to foreign trade. In December 1938, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau arranged a private American loan of $25 million to China, to be repaid through shipments of tung oil, a varnish product whose real importance lay not in itself, but in what the arrangement signified: a quiet American expression of faith that Chongqing would survive. Chiang also held on to the hope of an even less likely partnership. He had become fiercely anti-Communist during the 1920s, yet in the early years of the anti-Japanese war his greatest hope still rested on Soviet entry into the conflict. Soviet advisers and pilots had aided China from 1937 to 1939, but the USSR never formally declared war on Japan. Still, as Japanese aggression in northern Asia intensified, it remained possible that the Soviets would eventually be drawn in.   Then, as so often happened whenever Chiang tried to impose some control over the course of the war, events beyond China's borders altered the struggle in fundamental ways. While Western attention remained fixed on Europe's darkening horizon, a battle with major consequences for East Asia unfolded on the frontiers of Outer Mongolia, Manchukuo, and the eastern Soviet Union. Throughout much of 1938 and early 1939, one faction within the Japanese Imperial Army sought to pressure the Soviets along their eastern frontier. The USSR appeared vulnerable; Stalin's paranoid purges had executed or exiled many of the Red Army's best officers. In May 1939, fighting broke out near Nomonhan between forces from Soviet-backed Mongolia and Japanese troops from Manchukuo. Within days, both sides had reinforced heavily, until nearly 60,000 Soviet troops faced about 40,000 soldiers from the Kwantung Army. Over the next four months, until mid-September, they fought a major battle ending in a decisive Japanese defeat and establishing the reputation of General Georgi Zhukov, who would later become one of Stalin's most celebrated wartime commanders. The much-derided Soviet Army had fought with formidable effectiveness, and the result was not only a ceasefire but also a nonaggression pact between the two sides, extinguishing, in one stroke, Chiang's hopes for a Chinese-Soviet military alliance. The final blow came after developments in northern Europe. In the Winter War of 1939–1940, the Soviet invasion of Finland led Britain and France to back a motion expelling the USSR from the League of Nations. China, then a member of the League Council, declined to use its veto to block the resolution. Stalin was enraged by Chiang's failure to prevent Soviet expulsion, and mutual suspicion thereafter poisoned relations between the two leaders for the rest of the war against Japan. China would now have to continue without further major Soviet backing.   By the spring of 1940, China's position had become deeply precarious. In March, senior Japanese negotiators sought an agreement with Chiang in Chongqing, while Wang Jingwei was trying to formalize his rival Nationalist government in Nanjing. This effort, known in Chinese as the Tong Operation, and in Japanese as Operation Kiri, led to talks in Hong Kong from March 7 to 10, 1940. Militarily, the Nationalists were in grave danger: the United States remained neutral, and Europe was in chaos. Indeed, that same spring, with France seemingly near collapse, the British government also sent out discreet feelers to explore the possibility of a negotiated peace with Germany. For China, Western assistance was nowhere in sight. The Japanese judged the moment favorable for pressing Chiang toward concessions. Faced with serious danger to his regime, Chiang allowed the door to negotiation to open just slightly.   As a consequence, the Japanese delayed full recognition of Wang Jingwei's new government. Through the summer and autumn of 1940, Tokyo remained uncertain about the defector. Prominent Japanese figures such as Count Arima Yoriyasu of the Privy Council said Wang's conduct demonstrated his untrustworthiness, and Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke continued to express interest in an agreement with Chongqing. Zhou Fohai captured the defectors' frustration, men who believed they had made the highest patriotic sacrifice when he wrote: "Chongqing sees us as collaborators, we see ourselves as heroes. We think only peace can save the country — that's why we think of ourselves as heroes. If we end up classed as heroes, then China and Japan will be at peace. If we end up classed as collaborators, then China and Japan will never be at peace."That formulation conveyed something genuine about the moral dizziness of the period. Most of the defectors were not men devoid of principles; they were men whose principles had carried them to a place that history would find exceptionally hard to pardon.   The "New Fourth Army Incident" brought to a close one of the most consequential years in modern Chinese political history. The battle of ideas unfolding in 1940 was already visible to informed contemporaries. Early in 1941, US Ambassador Nelson Johnson sent Washington a detailed assessment of the Chinese political situation in reply to another report passed along by Major Evans Carlson, an American officer who had made an extensive journey through the Chinese interior. The contrast between the two documents revealed a widening split in American views of China. Carlson, together with his travelling companion, the New Zealander Rewi Alley, had become increasingly sympathetic to the Communists after visiting their territories in 1938 and admiring their discipline. Carlson described the Nationalists as moving toward "fascism," and argued that American aid should be conditioned on Chiang's government being compelled to adopt more "democratic" institutions.   Johnson strongly disagreed. It was "only normal and natural," he wrote, that the Nationalists wanted to retain power, but during the war they had established the National Political Consultative Council, in which multiple parties, including the Communists, were represented. He also noted that the CCP could publish its own newspaper in Chongqing in a way that would have been impossible before the war. One might have expected the Nationalists to use the war as a justification "to extinguish . . . all political opposition," yet instead they had chosen to "muddle along." Johnson further thought that the influence of competing cliques inside the Nationalist Party had been overstated. Chiang Kai-shek, by contrast, had "grown in stature, as he has come to be recognized as the symbol of united resistance to Japanese encroachment"; ultimately, "it is he who makes the final decisions." Johnson did agree with Carlson that Chiang's regime was hesitant to encourage a broad-based popular movement animated by anything beyond anti-Japanese feeling, though he also pointed to Nationalist cooperative programs and county-level reforms. But he rejected the idea that American support should depend on sweeping political transformation. Chiang was committed to continuing the war against Japan, and Washington should back him in that effort. In a notably farsighted passage, Johnson wrote: "It is my view that since the fall of the Manchu dynasty and the collapse of the traditional Chinese concept of government the Chinese people have been feeling their way along toward a new evolving form of government. A definitive form of government has not yet been established and may not be established for decades; it may or may not be in the form of a democracy, but it will be a type of government that will be adapted to the needs of China and its people." The tension between these two American interpretations,  Carlson's idealized belief in the Communists and Johnson's pragmatic support for Chiang was more than a minor bureaucratic dispute. It foreshadowed a debate that would dominate American foreign policy for the next decade, and would still echo when the People's Republic was proclaimed in 1949.   The disastrous experience of 1940 seemed to cast doubt on whether any future for China existed outside the Japanese Empire. As 1941 wore on, another dreadful event shook the exhausted wartime capital. On June 5, Chongqing endured roughly five hours of bombing, driving the population into air-raid shelters. In one tunnel in the Shibati district, the conditions were even worse than usual. The large shelter was supposed to have lights and electric fans, but the generators had never been connected. Inside, the air was dark, hot, and suffocating. Around ten that evening, people began emerging from the tunnel when rumors spread that the Japanese were returning with poison-gas bombs. Air-raid wardens forced people back inside, even as others were still trying to come out. Bodies toppled over one another, and panic spread as people realized they could not breathe. Over the next few hours, hundreds died underground in the darkness. The exact number was never definitively established: the official figure was 461, though a contemporary police report placed it far higher, at 1,527. What rescuers remembered most vividly were the tortured expressions of the dead, people tangled together in each other's arms as they lost consciousness, clothing ripped to shreds by desperate hands clawing at one another, and bodies so drenched in sweat that they looked as though they had been soaked in water. One survivor, Tang Zhengchang, remembered a hand reaching out from a pile of corpses and pleading, "Sir, please help me . . ." The grip on Tang's shorts was so tight that it pulled them off; he escaped the tunnel naked from the waist down. Official descriptions of the disaster were softened. Even so, the tragedy deepened the city's gloom and in a place already saturated with grief, an added layer of darkness mattered a great deal.   Yet events elsewhere would soon offer the National Government a narrow margin of hope. Late in 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt won re-election as president of the United States. "I am not going to send your boys into any foreign wars," he had proclaimed during the campaign against Wendell Willkie. But Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull both understood that Nazi domination of Europe posed a grave challenge to American influence there. And with China's "Open Door" to trade effectively shut by Japanese occupation, it was becoming increasingly clear that strict neutrality might not remain viable. In a 1941 report on China's domestic and foreign situation, Ambassador Johnson noted that during Germany's sweeping victories across Europe in mid-1940, the Chinese had become anxious about whether the Allies would remain committed to their cause. Britain's refusal to surrender, however, together with continuing Soviet goodwill, lifted public morale in China. People now looked toward the United States and Britain for support and felt that "victory" was "virtually theirs."   Then, on June 22, 1941, the world awoke to news that roughly three million German soldiers were advancing into the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's invasion of the USSR, dramatically overturned the nonaggression that had governed relations between the two major European dictatorships for the previous two years. It transformed the war in Europe entirely. Less obviously, it also transformed the war in Asia. Thanks to intelligence leaks, Chiang Kai-shek had already realized that war between Germany and the USSR was likely. After the neutrality treaty between the USSR and Japan was signed on April 13, 1941, Chiang predicted that the United States would be drawn into the Asian war, and even that Japan might eventually reverse course and strike the Soviet Union. If that happened, China would become the critical Asian ally of both Washington and Moscow. Stalin had been caught off guard by the German assault — largely because he ignored increasingly urgent warnings from senior colleagues receiving intelligence from well-placed spies in Germany and the Comintern, eager to preserve its alliances, now pressed the Chinese Communists to cooperate more closely with the Nationalists. On June 23, 1941, the CCP Central Committee responded with a declaration that it would "persevere in the Anti-Japanese United Front, persevere in Nationalist-Communist cooperation," and would align itself with the British, the Americans, and others resisting the "fascist rulers" of the Axis.   In Chongqing and Yan'an, the German attack on the Soviet Union was interpreted as a hopeful sign that Japan's fortunes might be beginning to turn. In Nanjing, the reaction was different. On June 22, Zhou Fohai recorded in his diary that, although the outcome "cannot be predicted," members of the Nanjing regime "all believe Germany will win and will take Moscow within two months." Zhou speculated that Japan could not easily reconcile its neutrality treaty with the USSR and its membership in the Anti-Comintern Pact, which was supposed to unite the Axis against Soviet expansionism. Still, because Germany had struck first, Japan was under no formal obligation to help. Zhou also continued to view events through a lens he had never abandoned: that of Chinese nationalism. "If Chongqing joins the Allies and they win," he wrote, "then this is good for China." If they lost, it would be disastrous for Chiang Kai-shek; but because Wang Jingwei had established a government in Nanjing under Japanese sponsorship, China now had "a foot in both boats." It was a ruthless calculation, but not a wholly dishonorable one. Zhou was not merely advancing Japanese interests. He was hedging, wagering on multiple futures in the name of a China he believed would endure beyond whatever constellation of powers happened to dominate at the moment. Whether posterity would judge that conduct prudent or collaborative was a question he could neither settle nor live to see resolved to his satisfaction.   The summer of 1941 marked a major geopolitical turning point in the war. Until then, the conflicts in China and Europe had remained separate, if desperate, struggles on the Eurasian continent. Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union now forced Japan to decide whether it too would enter war against the USSR. Debate in Tokyo was brief. Although some officials, including Foreign Minister Matsuoka, favored striking north before moving south, both the Kwantung Army and the Navy advised against helping Germany at least until Germany had succeeded in drawing substantial Soviet forces away from Siberia and into Europe. Konoye, once again prime minister, agreed. With the northern option set aside, Japanese leaders turned toward another great power instead: the United States. Japan's failure to gain further decisive momentum in China had fueled demands for broader regional expansion, especially into Southeast Asia, with its abundant oil, rubber, and other strategic resources. From 1940 onward, measures such as the pressure to close the Burma Road made it increasingly obvious that Tokyo had adopted a more aggressive posture in Asia. Unable to subdue China, Japanese policymakers chose instead to escalate the conflict still further.   Japanese political life had become ever more dominated by the unresolved war in China. As early as 1938, military expenditures consumed about 70 percent of the national budget, and that same year a National Mobilization Bill granted the government "total war control" over the zaibatsu, Japan's major industrial conglomerates. By 1940, the New Order was making itself felt throughout everyday life, with campaigns against luxury and extravagant consumption taking on new prominence. In February 1940, a parliamentarian was expelled from the Diet simply for daring to criticize the "holy war" in China. In such an atmosphere, retreat from imperial ambitions became increasingly unthinkable. That figure, 70 percent of the national budget devoted to the military is worth dwelling on, because it reveals something essential about the trap in which Japanese strategists had placed themselves. The war in China had not been won, yet abandoning it would have meant admitting a failure so severe that it would have shaken the ideological and institutional foundations of military supremacy in Japanese politics. The only apparent ways out required pushing further in: more conquest, more extraction, more expansion. The logic was brutally clear, and profoundly destructive.   The Roosevelt administration watched these developments with growing alarm. Though still formally neutral, the United States was already using Lend-Lease to provide major assistance to Britain and the Soviet Union in their struggles against Germany. It now expanded aid to China as well. On February 10, Roosevelt's representative Lauchlin Currie visited Chongqing to inform Chiang Kai-shek that the United States would soon provide $45 million in military equipment. General John Magruder, head of the small AMMISCA mission,  the American Military Mission in China had been sent to Chongqing in September 1941, as part of quiet preparation for possible Chinese entry into an alliance against Japan. The China branch of the OSS, precursor to the CIA, was led by General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, whom Roosevelt had dispatched to China in early 1941.   The Americans repeatedly tried to discourage Japan from moving south into Southeast Asia, but relations only grew more confrontational. Japan occupied the southern part of French Indochina, and in response the United States imposed an oil embargo in July 1941. The consequences were immense. Japan imported around 80 percent of its oil from the United States. Without that supply, its navy, the essential instrument for southern expansion  had reserves for perhaps eighteen months. The real question facing Tokyo, then, was not whether it must act, but how soon. Unable any longer to resist mounting military pressure for war, Konoye resigned on October 16 and was replaced as premier by General Tōjō Hideki. Tokyo accelerated its preparations for conflict with the Western powers. Planned targets included Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies, and the Philippines. I should note, if you want to learn about all of this history in more detail, you can go check out the pacific war channel on youtube. I have a chronological series that is just now talking about events like the Japanese invasion of french indochina and the road to pearl harbor.   Throughout the autumn of 1941, increasingly desperate negotiations took place between Japan and the United States. Washington insisted that Japan withdraw from China; Tokyo was equally firm that it would do no such thing. From the Japanese point of view, the demand to leave China was not a serious negotiating position but a demand for national humiliation a call to repudiate four years of war, vast casualties, and the ideological basis of Japanese militarism in a single diplomatic act. In the end, the gulf between the two positions could not be bridged.   While civilian and military leaders in Tokyo argued over the pace at which they should move toward war, few among Japan's rulers doubted that war was coming. At the imperial conference of November 5, it was formally agreed that if no satisfactory diplomatic solution had been reached by December 1, war would follow soon after. Talks in Washington between Ambassador Nomura Kichisaburō, diplomat Kurusu Saburō, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull led nowhere. On November 26, Hull delivered a note repeating the American position that Japan must withdraw from both China and Indochina. On December 1, the imperial conference resolved to go to war; the following day, the date of attack was fixed as December 8, December 7 by American time. In one sense, this was the culmination toward which the entire previous decade had been moving. The war in China had started as a localized conflict, then expanded into a continental one, and was now about to become something larger still: a truly global war, stretching from the North Atlantic to the western Pacific. China's long, lonely resistance would suddenly gain new dimensions and new allies,  though not the ones Chiang had spent four years trying to cultivate, and not under circumstances he would have chosen.   In the early morning of December 7, 1941, the US Pacific Fleet lay anchored at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, its sailors and officers still largely asleep as dawn crept across the Pacific. The attack did not come without warning signs,  American and Japanese diplomats had been locked in increasingly desperate negotiations throughout the autumn, each side hardening its position until no room remained to maneuver. Washington had demanded that Japan withdraw from China, a condition Tokyo viewed not as a serious opening offer but as a demand for national humiliation: a call to repudiate four years of brutal war, hundreds of thousands of casualties, and the entire ideological foundation upon which Japanese militarism rested. No agreement was possible on those terms, and both sides privately knew it.   The strike force assembled in secret was formidable. Six aircraft carriers,  the Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū, Hiryū, Shōkaku, and Zuikaku had sailed under strict radio silence across the North Pacific, launching their aircraft in two successive waves before the American base had any meaningful chance to respond. The first wave of approximately 183 planes swept in just before 8 a.m., targeting the rows of battleships moored along Battleship Row and the military airfields at Wheeler, Hickam, and Ford Island simultaneously, ensuring that American aircraft could not scramble in time to mount an effective defense. A second wave of roughly 170 planes followed less than an hour later, pressing the attack on damaged ships and harbor installations.   The destruction was staggering. The battleship Arizona suffered a catastrophic magazine explosion after a armor-piercing bomb penetrated her forward decks, killing nearly 1,177 of her crew in minutes, almost half of the total American dead from the entire attack. The Oklahoma capsized after being struck by multiple torpedoes. The West Virginia and California sank at their moorings. In total, seventeen vessels were damaged or destroyed, and the vast majority of military aircraft at the nearby airfields were caught on the ground and obliterated before they could take flight. Around 2,400 Americans were killed and another 1,100 wounded, making it the deadliest single attack on American soil or territory in the nation's history to that point.   Yet the attack was not a complete strategic success for Japan. The US Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers, the vessels that would ultimately decide the naval war in the Pacific happened to be at sea that morning and escaped unharmed. The harbor's fuel storage and repair facilities were also left largely intact, allowing the fleet to reconstitute faster than Japanese planners had anticipated. What Japan achieved in tactical devastation, it partly squandered in strategic miscalculation. The attack ended American neutrality instantly and irrevocably. The following day, President Roosevelt addressed Congress, calling December 7 "a date which will live in infamy," and within hours the United States declared war on Japan. For China, after more than four years of fighting alone, the blow that devastated Pearl Harbor paradoxically carried a thread of desperate hope at last, the great power Chiang Kai-shek had spent years trying to draw into the conflict had arrived, not under circumstances he would have chosen, but arrived nonetheless. I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. After years of fighting, China's situation darkened in 1941 with intense bombing of Chongqing and fears of poison-gas attacks. Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June shifted alliances and pressured Japan toward wider war. Japan escalated plans for Southeast Asia, suffered an oil embargo, and negotiations with the United States broke down over withdrawing from China and Indochina. Then the Pearl Harbor attack began the Pacific War.

Alex Atallah is the Founder and CEO @ OpenRouter, the unified interface for LLMs. The company has raised over $153M in funding, with the latest valuation pricing the company at $1.3BN. OpenRouter is reportedly in an acquisition process with Stripe for $10BN.  AGENDA: 00:00 Is OpenRouter Selling to Stripe for $10 Billion? 04:05 What Did Alex Learn From Scaling OpenSea? 06:38 What Did OpenRouter's Founding Thesis Get Wrong? 14:47 Is AI Model Routing Already Being Commoditized? 19:12 Do Falling Token Prices Help or Hurt OpenRouter? 27:16 Should America Be Alarmed by Chinese Open Models? 32:43 Will US Open-Source Models Compete With Chinese Models in the Next 12 Months? 39:26 Will the Router Be Swallowed by the Agent Framework? 48:56 Is Distillation Wrong—and How Should We Look at It? 50:01 Is the Reported $10 Billion Stripe Deal Actually Happening?

A total solar eclipse is coming up on Wednesday. The Moon will cover the Sun, turning day to night across a narrow slice of the globe. Parts of Alaska and the northeastern United States will see a partial eclipse. The timing of the eclipse is known down to the second, and has been for decades; astronomers can predict eclipses far into the future. But making such predictions isn’t easy. It requires a detailed knowledge of the Moon’s orbit around Earth, Earth’s orbit around the Sun, and even the shapes of Earth and the Moon. Just when the first prediction was made is unclear. There’s no doubt that people have been predicting lunar eclipses for thousands of years. But they’re easier to forecast. Earth’s shadow is roughly 35 times wider than the Moon’s, so you don’t need to be quite as precise to get it right. There are stories that the Chinese were predicting solar eclipses more than 4,000 years ago, but no confirmation. An eclipse in 585 BC that stopped a war supposedly was predicted by a Greek scientist. But many present-day scientists doubt that. The first confirmed prediction was made by Edmond Halley, using the laws of gravity recently devised by Isaac Newton. Halley forecast that an eclipse would cross England on May 3rd, 1715. And he was right. So the event is known as Halley’s Eclipse – honoring the prediction of an astronomical spectacle. Script by Damond Benningfield

Contest links: General $50k https://www.chinatalk.media/p/50k-chinatalk-submission-hiring-contest we're looking at submissions on a rolling basis! AI evals: Due Over the past few years, we've seen hints of policymakers and national leaders using AI models in their actual policy decision-making. The Prime Minister of Sweden said he uses it for second opinions on policy; the German Chancellor is testing it to draft legislation; even Trump said he had it re-write a speech at some point. It's fair to assume that senior leadership across the world, and in Washington as well, have started using AI not just for tactical or operational tasks, but increasingly for broad strategic decision-making. While that's exciting — there's the promise of uplift and smarter calls on some of the most consequential decisions leaders face in foreign policy and national security — we're also flying blind. Enormous effort and energy goes into benchmarking and evaluation for things like coding. The experiments you can run to make models better at software development are much easier to execute and much lower-stakes than running a real experiment when you're deciding whether to invade a country or sign a treaty. That's why we at ChinaTalk are trying to kickstart a field aimed at helping researchers and policymakers understand exactly what they're working with when they ask these models to support some of the most consequential decisions they may make in their lifetimes. We're launching an evals/essay project contest to explore this theme. I've brought on two expert AI eval creators to discuss why the field is important, what interesting work has already been done on how models approach broad national-security and strategic questions, and how you — as an eval professional, semi-professional, or just a concerned person — can contribute new ways to poke and prod at these models and see what they can really do. Joining us today: Florian Brand, research engineer at Prime Intellect, and John Chen, professor at the University of Arizona, who's done some pretty wild things getting models to start nuclear wars with each other in Civ V. Our conversation covers: How frontier labs are hitting eval-building limits — they've gone from undergrads to PhDs to field experts, and the models are now catching the experts' mistakes. How Civilization V exposes AI's strategic blind spots (terrible second-order reasoning) and models' distinct strategic personalities (Claude's really into science!). Why ethical prompting in Civilization V still doesn't stop models from launching nukes. Jordan's PresidentBench eval, where a Chinese model was nonchalant about a Taiwan invasion, while Claude wanted to keep Taiwan free and independent. Advice for designing better AI evals and ChinaTalk's new essay/evals contest! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join the Millionaire University AI Mastermind at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠MillionaireUniversity.com/AI #1030 What if the secret to building an unstoppable creative team has nothing to do with resumes — and everything to do with psychology, personality, and energy? Larry Walshe — founder of the globally renowned Larry Walshe Studios — joins host Brien Gearin to break down how he recruits and builds high-performance teams in the creative industry. Larry shares his journey from West End performer to world-class event designer serving elite clients across the globe, and reveals the unique framework he uses to curate teams for multimillion-dollar events, including Chinese zodiac archetypes, personality colors, and learning styles. If you want to hire smarter, lead more effectively, and attract top creative talent, this episode delivers a fresh, practical perspective! (Original Air Date - 12/3/25) What we discuss with Larry: + Larry's journey from performer to designer + Building a $12M global events brand + Recruiting through archetypes and energy + Using Chinese zodiac in team building + Personality colors for team harmony + Matching roles to learning styles + Avoiding “vibe-based” hiring mistakes + Why small jobs create big opportunities + Scaling creative teams across locations Thank you, Larry! Check out Larry Walshe at ⁠LarryWalshe.com⁠. Follow Larry on all social platforms @larrywalshe. Watch the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠video podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ of this episode! Get your FREE 5 Minute Business Plan at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠MillionaireUniversity.com/Plan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ To get exclusive offers mentioned in this episode and to support the show, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠MillionaireUniversity.com/Sponsors Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Gateways to Awakening, Yasmeen Turayhi sits down with Dr. Edith Ubuntu-Chan, Chinese medicine doctor, consciousness pioneer, founder of the Luminous Human Institute, and one of the leading voices exploring blindfold vision, intuition, and expanded human perception.Dr. Edith shares the remarkable journey that led her into the world of blindfold vision after witnessing children seemingly perceive information beyond their ordinary senses. What began as curiosity evolved into years of research, training hundreds of families, and exploring how these practices may unlock far more than the ability to "see" without sight.Together, Yasmeen and Edith explore the intersection of intuition, telepathy, consciousness, education, and the rapidly changing world of artificial intelligence. They discuss why joy, play, coherence, and relaxed awareness appear to be essential ingredients for expanding human perception, and why cultivating our inner capacities may become one of the most important skills of the future.In this conversation, you'll discover:What blindfold vision (or Mindsight) is, and why it's about much more than seeing without eyesightWhy Edith believes intuition and expanded perception are innate human capacitiesHow children often access these abilities with remarkable easeThe surprising relationship between blindfold vision and telepathyWhy coherence, play, and curiosity unlock greater perceptionHow parents are transforming alongside their children through this workWhat these practices reveal about education, consciousness, and human developmentWhy our greatest challenge in the age of AI may not be technological—but deeply humanHow cultivating our "inner technology" may become one of the defining skills of the futureWhether you're curious about intuition, consciousness research, telepathy, education, or the next frontier of human potential, this conversation invites you to consider a profound question:We would LOVE to hear from you! What did you learn? Tune into Gateways to Awakening for more conversations with leading thinkers, scientists, mystics, entrepreneurs, and consciousness pioneers exploring the future of human potential.If this episode resonates with you, you may also enjoy Yasmeen's work through the Inner Knowing School, where she teaches intuition, energetic mastery, multidimensional awareness, and nervous system regulation through private immersions and executive cohorts. You can also explore Yasmeen's latest book, A Glitch in the Matrix: 10 Energy Codes to Become the Main Character of Your Life, available on Audible, Kindle, and in print. The book explores intuition, consciousness, timelines, emotional regulation, and how to manage your energy instead of your time.Thank you,